Bookings not being accepted by system

[A2Zeb]

We've had several customers call us to say they are unable to make a booking.

The common claim is that, when they click 'Book' after filling in their details (using the booking page), the page just reloads. No error messages are showing, and no booking is processed. Some customers have told us they thought they had booked, which is causing unhappy customers/missed appointments. 

Often, we are unable to replicate the issue so it is unclear what is causing this - though some Booking staff have reported similar issues across different calendars and services. All services are 1:n booking slots (classroom style bookings). I am not sure whether it is possible that appointments are 'locked' whilst other customers are attempting to book into the same appointment? Or whether there may be any issues with particular browsers (anecdotally, customers unable to book appear to often be using an iPhone)?

Has anyone else had similar issues, and/or ideas as to what may be behind this? We are a little concerned about platform stability/availability as things stand. 

[#2]

@A2Zeb Bookings has been causing me so much grief this week, in addition to customers not being able to book like you've mentioned, it's been sending different Join links to people, removing locations from bookings, removing reminder emails at random, removing attendee limits. 

I know this doesn't help you fix it, but I hope it's a relief that it's not just you, the whole system seems to be having a problem at the moment.

[#3]

@georgiaengel It is always nice knowing I'm not alone - except that this means it's unlikely there's anything I can do about it 😞

Microsoft O365 Admin Status has consistently listed Bookings Health Status as Healthy. It's a tricky one to raise a ticket for, because these 'attempted bookings' don't leave a trace on the system, and we can't replicate it.

[#4]

Do you see this happening for any particular Bookings calendar or its across multiple calendars? If your bookings calendar is published for everyone, can you please DM your self-schedule Bookings page URL and also mention which service is having this issue?

[#5]

The issue is occurring in all calendars, but I have now discovered what the problem is.

When customers forget to select the time when filling out their booking form, the page just refreshes without processing the booking. Previously, whenever a customer forgot to select the time, an error message would appear. This no longer happens - leading to customers thinking they made a booking (never realising they forgot to select a time), or just thinking 'the system is broken'.

[#6]

Hi I am having this same issue. We take around 200-400 bookings a week and there are many cases of people thinking that they have made their booking, then either emailing to ask if has been confirmed or just showing up on the day and then we are oversubscribed for the sessions, and what's more, we don't have any of their details and they cannot be processed. This is adding many man hours of sending out guidance to individuals, telling people that they cannot attend on the day and then chasing up details to issue certificates. Our client is a region wide healthcare organisation, meaning that it is clinicians booking full days off to attend our training!!! PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS!!!!

I had previously set the bookings to "All Day" setting, but that caused issues where it was adding new bookings to the calendar, so my work around was to change it to set times!

This really isn't good enough. I am already doing an options appraisal to see what we might change to in the new financial year as the current situation is untenable and means I will have to abandon Microsoft.

[#7]

Agreed, it is a serious problem. Since I can now replicate the problem, I have raised a ticket with the Microsoft support desk. I will update here when I receive a reply.

[#8]

Yes we've had similar issues but around attendee lists clearing and only showing the last person who registered.
Recently though we've also been getting the blank screens too when people are registering.
I wondered if this had something to do with using links that were maybe old and needed to be regenerated.

[#9 · Accepted solution]

Microsoft support has confirmed that there was a back-end bug causing the message for missing information not to display, but the blank booking page to reload instead. They reverted back to an earlier version and this has fixed the issue we were facing.

[#10]

@A2Zeb 

Hi, I have literally just got off the phone with them and ran multiple tests during the call. The issue is not resolved for us. They are passing it up the chain and I hope to receive a response soon. Or even better, a form that validates on screen before it submits and then refreshes without any information.

[#11]

All fixed for me too now! Phew!

[#12]

Speak to tech support at Microsoft and they will fix that for you. We had the same issue at one point. It was only when we added people manually though, via the back-end calendar. They fixed it for us, but didn’t give us any feedback, so assuming it was a sync error. We were adding people manually via the public facing booking page for a while, as a work around. And downloading the TSV all the time.