Bookings not showing correct staff availability

Brass Contributor

We have been using Microsoft Bookings for over a year to have patrons book appointments. Since last week it is no longer showing our available time slots correctly. We have three staff members connected to a service and one remains unchanged, but the other two of us are now only showing two available slots each day (at 8:30am and 1:30 pm), when we used to have them throughout the day based on our Outlook availability.

I've checked the settings many times and can't figure out what went wrong since nothing was changed. The time zone is correct. I have put in the correct hours in 4 places. 1) The main booking availability, 2) my personal staff availability, 3) the service availability for the service I created, 4) the business hours.

Please provide instructions for restoring our correct availability to Bookings.

Thank you!

8 Replies
Aha! just spent an hour digging around with our IT and found the problem. Turns out in the new version of Bookings, appointments can only be scheduled on the half hour. 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.
Microsoft, PLEASE change this back to allow custom times!!!

@tasleec 

 

I noticed in the past couple of days that when I use GetStaffAvailability it used to have the Status for Booked Appointments as "BookingsAvailabilityStatus.Busy", but now those same ones are returning a status of "BookingsAvailabilityStatus.SlotsAvailable"

 

I do not know why, I am going to create a post about this as I believe it to be a bug

Aha! Someone proposed a solution in another thread that turned out to be a good workaround for us, so sharing here in case anyone else needs it. Keeping the duration and our custom calendar the same, but changing the time interval to 5 minutes under Scheduling Policy fixed the issue for us. yay!
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-bookings/bd-p/MicrosoftBookings?emcs_t=S2h8ZW1haWx8...
Apologies for the issues you have faced here. We are looking at this on priority and will have a fix rolled out soon. In the meantime, please see if you can try one of these workarounds:
1. Reduce your service's time increments to 5 mins or 10 mins.
2. Make your availability windows start at :00 or :30 if your time increments is set to 30m.
A fix for this issue was rolled out recently. Can you please confirm if you are seeing the slots going back to normal?

@davisjr  Yes, the issue has been resolved and it is working normally again. Thank you!

@davisjr 

 

Hi, I am still seeing booked appointment times come in as "BookingsAvailabilityStatus.SlotsAvailable" instead of  "BookingsAvailabilityStatus.Busy" when using GetStaffAvailability 

@davisjr I still face this problem. I have asked bookings to sync with calendar availability. Despite the time being blocked for other appointments the bookings page shows the staff is available. Note I have turned off ability for user to select staff.