Bookings MS - Group Appointment - One customer cancels, it is cancelled for everyone (Customer+staff

[Marie75020]

I already have seen that this problem was notified but it still don't have any answer for 2 years : https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-bookings/appointments-keep-canceling-in-bookings/m-...

I have created group appointment up to 100 people.

When one of the customer cancels it (it seems that it is specifically customer with a gmail email address) - from his email notification or via google calendar - it cancelled the appointment for everyone.

We set up the service to disable the functionnality "Allow clients to manage their appointments when booked by you or your team on their behalf" in base details, but we still have the option to cancel it as customer.

Another intriguing part is that you can find this option "Let customers manage their own appointments" for each appointment created, that you have to manually uncheck it for all of them, but in any case, it does not block the cancellation by a customer. Moreover, when a customer cancels, this option becomes active again automatically.

Is there not a solution that will be applied urgently on this subject?
This is a frustration for the customers and clearly a lack of viability

[#2]

@Marie75020 

I also have the same issue. Whenever I have a group booking and someone cancels, everybody gets a cancellation notification and even my staff doesn't see the booking in their calendar. 

As an administrator, I do see the booking in Calendar everything looks OK. 

I detected this issue when lots of customers complained about this confusion. Is there anything we can change in the setup to prevent this from happening?

[#3]

Hi @jcarballo1993 ,

To date, we have not found a solution in the settings of Bookings. And this bug seems to exist for several years without any answer from Microsoft.
We tried to ask other service providers using the solution who also found the same problem.
This seems to be a development issue on the part of Microsoft directly.
If we don't get an answer in the next few days, we will unfortunately have to find a more viable solution for group meeting booking.

[#4]

Was this issue resolved, we are experiencing the same problem at the moment

[#5]

@Jeanie23

No solution that I am aware of. What I did was to set up a notification when an appointment is cancelled. After I get that notification, I contact all customers to let them know the appointment continues.

[#6]

Hi

I am having this issue too. Very frustrating. Anyone have a solution?

Kind regards

Andy

[#7]

We are having a similar issue. We have booking slots for 3 people. When the second person books a slot it cancels the first person and when a 3rd person books it cancels the second person. All of the cancellations are to the Outlook calendar invitation. All 3 people are still showing on the booking in the MS Bookings calendar.

[#8]

Seeing this issue too, even when a fellow employee declines the invite (the meeting is cancelled and notification sent to all customers and employees)... This is crippling; makes Bookings unusable.  

[#9]

We are having the same issue of emails being sent regarding cancellations. We may stop using Bookings for the group services.

[#10]

@Roz_Donaldson 

We are also looking at alternatives. This is a longstanding issue that appears to have no resolution.

[#11]

@Marie75020 

Hopefully this can help you

After an 8+ week investigation with "Premier Support" - the conclusion is that the toggle should be disabled:

https://ibb.co/KynXL9Q - image valid for 6 months

"Send a meeting invite to the customer, in addition to the confirmation email"

Clearly to everyone else, this doesn't mean if someone else cancels their place on the multi-seat booking then tell everyone else that it's cancelled.... hopefully a few folks running multi-seat bookings will find this helpful whilst Premier Support manage their way out of a paper bag.

Best Wishes

Elliot at Surrey

[#12]

I've found this to be incredibly frustrating of Microsoft to have not addresses such a fundamental issue. Part of the appeal is the calendar invite so without this we might as well use another system!

I did hear that if you cancel via the MS bookings confirmation email, opposed to the calendar invite, it will only cancel that persons space, and not everyone's. Going to do more testing with this but heard this works.

[#13]

There is no action from Microsoft so far. Just tried it.

[#14]

Hi Elliot,

Did the workaround you suggested work for you? I have just started encountering this problem (second week) and looking to abandon MS Bookings. Can’t see MS premier support ever finding their way out of a paper bag to fix this. :grimacing_face:

[#15]

@Farooq_UK We have invited one of our "Staff"  to every group booking (as a customer as well as being on Staff) and found an external person cancelling does not delete the event as it did before. We are still testing this solution.

[#16]

@KymSchutz Thank you for sharing your workaround. How does this work for a weekly recurring event? Do you have to remember to manually add the staff member (as a customer) to hedge against the ‘cancel’ all bookings gremlin? 

[#17]

 @Farooq_UK 

In a previous post there was mention that the issue was surrounding those with a gmail email address. I curious if your "staff" has attempted to cancel from a gmail email address?

[#18]

Don’t have ‘staff’ attempting to cancel and causing the problem. That’s not the issue.

[#19]

on 3 out of 4 different services yes it worked. On a fourth, last December, it was a disaster and terrible support from Premier Support.