Appointments on the half hour are no longer showing on my booking page

[lizkh]

As of this morning any appointments that should be available are not showing on my booking page. All the appointments on the hour are showing fine, all the appointments on the half hour are not showing and are therefore not bookable. The appointments on the half hour were showing fine up until today, and some clients have managed to book appointments on the half hour previously.

My appointment duration is set to 1hr and time increments are set to 1hr. Staff hours vary and are very specific, so some staff have availability entered as such: 9am-10am, 10am-11am, 11am-12pm. These appointments are showing fine and are bookable by clients.

Other staff have availability entered as 9:30am-10:30am, 10:30am-11:30am, 11:30am-12:30pm, etc. and none of these appointments are showing on the booking page.

I have tried changing the time increments to 30mins, but this does not work for us as it allows clients to book appointments on the half hours where we do not wish them to.

I have also tried (as another poster suggested worked for them) changing the appointment duration to 59mins instead of 1hr, but it did not solve the problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

[#2]

Same thing happened to ours. Only showing availability twice a day for some odd reason for about a week now. What did you do to fix it? Or did it just randomly start working again?

[#3]

Mine still isn't working - we have multiple calendars that have been running for years and they're all broken. The only thing I could do to fix was set up my business hours for each time slot (very time consuming) and then set a shorter duration. E.g. Business hours 08:30-09:00, 30 minute duration. It's not ideal and we have had to put a note on the email confirmation about the actual booking length but still people will be confused. I am very cross with Microsoft right now as they haven't even bothered to acknowledge the problem, even with support tickets submitted. It's been nearly 2 weeks.

[#4]

Thanks for your answer. Your solution work for us but it's a pity that the software has so many bugs and too often

[#5]

@tasleec I still haven't heard anything on my support case. I ended up having to change my appointment lengths to 30 minutes and set my time to be like 9:30a-10:00a, 10:30a-11:00a, 11:30a-12:00a, etc. 

Fortunately in our case, the people scheduling the appointment just need to know when to arrive. They don't necessarily need to know when the appointment actually ends. So even though the appointment will take a full hour, having it show as 30 minutes isn't the end of the world. 

Not thrilled with the workaround. Definitely not thrilled with Microsoft's response time. But at least I can book appointments again. 

[#6]

Argh! sorry to hear that. Thanks for sharing your workaround. Not ideal at all! wish they would respond with a fix!

[#7]

Argh! Thanks for sharing. Hope they respond with a fix soon!

[#8]

I'm having the same issue.  We set our calendars up with custom times as the consultants want specific appointment slots and durations for different services, some start on the hour, some on 15 or 45 minute mark and some on the half hour.  It was working perfectly fine last year, and up until last week, now all of a sudden only the appointments on the hour are showing up on the booking page! 

[#9]

Yes, just spent an hour digging around with our IT and found that was the problem. We have a wonky school schedule and had a whole special custom calendar set up so students could schedule appointments with us that aligned with their class periods. Turns out in the new version of Bookings, appointments can only be scheduled on the half hour.
Microsoft, PLEASE change this back to allow custom times!!!

[#10]

I have the same problem, I can no longer make 15 minutes appointments and appointments can only be made on the hour and half hour. We have been using Bookings since April 2021 and this one change has created complete chaos!!! Microsoft please revert back to allowing appointments on the 15 and 45 past the hour.

[#11]

@tasleec were you able to find documentation that half hour time increments is the intended behaviour? I can't imagine it is. That would make bookings unusable.

[#12]

@ghanna870 

No, I haven't seen that explicitly written out. And when you choose times for your schedule, the dropdown menu includes times by 15 minute intervals (i.e., 8:00, 8:15, 8:30...), but in the new version even if I choose to make availability start at 8:15, it doesn't work.  In the old version I could type in custom times, so I could start at 8:25 if I wanted it to, but not any more. Grr!

[#13]

@lizkh Potential solution:

I found that when configuring a service inside of the bookings calendar Microsoft has decided to change the time increments of available bookings and the length of time that bookings actually are. 

To configure a service to have a 1-hour duration you would do so here (duration is how long the appointment will last):

This is completely separate from scheduling policies. The time increments determine how often your service is available. In this case, my service is available every 30 minutes (10:00, 10:30, 11:00, 11:30, etc.). 15-minute increments would result in 10:00, 10:15, 10:30, 10:45 11:00, etc.

For instance, I found that setting meeting times at one-hour durations and setting the time increments at 30 minutes resulted in a bookings page that looked like this:

This shows that I am able to have one-hour bookings at 30-minute time increments. Please respond to my thread if you have any questions.

[#14]

@net_run  you're a genius!!  I set my time increments to 15 minutes and now my appointments which start on the 15 minute mark are showing up!  Thanks for sharing.

[#15]

Thanks very much for your advice, unfortunately though it doesn't work for my situation (unless I have misunderstood what you have explained).

My appointments need to be 1 hour long so I had set the duration to 1 hour, and I only want my appointments to be booked every hour so I had the increment set to 1 hour also. Some of my staff have appointments available on the hour e.g. 10am, 11am, 12pm. Other staff members have appointments available on the half hours e.g. 9:30am, 10:30am, 11:30am. This was working fine until last week when all the appointments on the half hour stopped showing on the booking page.

If I change the increment to 30 mins, the booking page does show the appointments on the half hours, BUT it allows clients to book appointments every half an hour, which I don't want. For example, if I have a staff member with available appointments at 9:30am-10:30am, 10:30am-11:30am, 11:30am-12:30pm, it allows a client to book an hour appointment at 10am-11am. This means that 9:30am-10:00am is a wasted half an hour, and instead of this staff member being able to have 3 hour-long appointments that morning, they will only be able to have a maximum of 2.

To get around this, I have the duration set to 30 mins and the increment set to 30 mins. I then have blocked off the 2nd half of every hour available in my staff members personal calendars so that they are not available to book (very time consuming).
E.g. setting duration and increment to 30 mins for a staff member whose availability is 9:30-10:30, 10:30-11:30, 11:30-12:30, allows clients to book at 9:30, 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, 11:30, 12:00. But if I then block out 10:00-10:30, 11:00-11:30, 12:00-12:30 in my staff members calendar, it gives the desired result that appointments show as available to book at 9:30, 10:30 and 11:30. The downside is that it is very time consuming to set up and clients see that appointment times are 30 minutes long, not an hour (not a huge problem, but also not ideal).

[#16]

I am the same! It is driving me mad!

[#17]

@lizkh I have had the exact same problem. It actually made my calendar look fully booked up until I realised.  I am having to keep 9.00 instead of 8.30 (when the service starts) and inform clients of the change / bug. Not ideal!

[#18]

Looks like I am a week or two late to the party here. I just had my first end user report this issue a day ago. After a couple of hours of troubleshooting on my own this morning, I finally stumbled across the fact that it was only impacting appointments scheduled to start on the :30s. Then, I thankfully found this thread.

This is absolutely a new thing that has just popped up. We have long-used Bookings to schedule appointments at all kinds of crazy increments and start/end times. I am pretty sure we have twisted this tool in directions that maybe shouldn't be possible and made it work. This one baffles me.

The solution that I found to work was to leave the start times, duration, and the like all as is and then set the Time increments to = 1 minute. As soon as I did so, all the appointments popped up as they should and the confirmation emails and calendar invites all show the correct times. Of course, this is only working perfectly for us because we don't have back to back appointments to deal with. For those that do, it would surely impact the times of the previous and next appointment availability.

Microsoft.... please fix this ASAP.

[#19]

@rober1ba THANK YOU!!  

Keeping our half-hour time duration and custom schedule but changing time intervals under Scheduling Policy to 5 minutes fixed the issue for us! so grateful for you sharing this solution. 

But yes, Microsoft, it used to work without having to do this before. Please fix!

[#20]

Let us get back on this, thanks for sharing feedback!

[#21]

@lizkh I am having the same issue except my appointments on the 5's are either not showing up or are showing as available 5 minutes later. We use our calendar for booking lessons in our library and our school blocks start at 8:45, 9:35, etc. When the 8:45 block shows up at 8:50, the next block does not appear because there are no longer 50 min available for the next block. It seems like this issue is relatively new (within the last few weeks) as our calendar has been set up and functioning well for the past few years with the same schedule. Perhaps there has been a new update to Bookings that has affected the calendar functionality? It would be great to hear something from Microsoft about what is being done to fix this issue.