Issues with Bookings and group bookings

[JShaba]

Hi all,

Having a few issues that I was hoping someone could help me with.

We are getting ready to ease restrictions for our office for COVID. We are opening our office and are setting up an MS Bookings page to accommodate this. However, I'm running into a few issues.

We set up a service that is just a daily booking and set the maximum attendants to 200 people.

The issues:

1. Whenever someone books a day EG May 1st. Then for some reason, all other days in May are no longer bookable. The booking calendar shows 1 out of 200 seats taken for May 1st but for some reason no user is able to book any date in May once the first booking is made
2. I created the service and it automatically adds me as the allocated staff even though I didn't select any staff for the service. Whenever someone books a day, it adds an item in my Outlook calendar. So everyday will be completely booked out for me because of these bookings
3. The TSV export for some reason does not update, and it does not show the customer name or email. Is there another way to easily export a list of users that booked?

Those are the main issues I'm facing. I managed to get around issue 1 by changing it from a day booking to 12 hours. Not ideal, but a workaround nonetheless.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[#2]

@JShaba I had the same problem. Go to the calendar in bookings and see if there is something there that is blocking the calendar. This was my problem. 

[#3]

Hi @Elisa_Hanley, I have the exact issue as the original poster. What do you mean by "see if there is something there that is blocking the calendar"? Do you have an example of what a "blocker" could be?

Thanks for your help.

[#4]

@redink In the booking, go to the calendar on the left. Then go to the day the issues are occurring and see if anything is listed as an appointment there. 

[#5]

`@JShaba 

2

For this problem, remove tick from this option - ‘Notify the business visa email when a booking is created or changed’ on the bookings page (if you are using default schedule policy for this service or go to the specific service and do so). Then when you add staff, tick the box which say ‘notify the staff via email when a booking assigned to them is created or changed’.

This way only your assigned staff to that particular service will get the email and not everyone

3

The booking activity dashboard is a bit slow and takes time to update. Weird thing.

Hope that helps.

[#6]

@JShaba I have a similar problem as well.

• I created a service with a max number of attendees set to 5.
• The service duration is set to 1 day. 
• The service has no staff assigned to it.
• There are a total of 4 staff members.
• I've unticked all email notifications.

When I attempt to test it, thinking I should be able to create 5 bookings in total on the same day, as soon as I get to 4 it disables the day I'm trying to book.

So, even though no staff members were assigned, the service is automatically assigning them to each booking! It makes the entire multiple attendees option completely useless. 

The context for this was to use it to book desks in an office building in order to comply with social distancing during COVID-19. Whilst I used 5 as a test number, the reality will be closer to 200 per floor. I can't add in 1000+ staff members to get around this (surely?!?!?)

[#7]

@Ben Murphy my use case was exactly the same.

In the end, instead of making the booking an all day booking, I made the booking a 9 hour one, that starts at 9am. It's not as nice but it get around the problem.

[#8]

I will never use bookings again. It has been determined that Eventbrite is the best to use for us and use the same link, vs a different link for each meeting. We just remove everyone from the Microsoft meeting. This is so much hassle that it's not worth it. We tried:(@redink 

[#9]

@Elisa_Hanley , yes I agree. I was hoping for more of a 'self-serve' option with regards to managing the number of staff per office but the idea that a staff member would somehow be psychic and know who should be in or not is ridiculous. We ditched Bookings and decided to roll our own Bookings app via React (for inclusion into SharePoint) to handle our office capacity during COVID. It's been a...underwhelming experience, to be honest.

[#10]

@JShaba 

I am having exactly the same issues as the original post. I am trying to book desks in a room for 1-week at a time. The "all day" or "multi-day" bookings are not allowing for more than 1 person to book a group booking. As a workaround, I had to make a single booking for 8 hours on Monday, and just put the actual details in the confirmation email. Definitely not a good solution.

[#11]

@Ben Murphy In my testing I had the same scenario as you with maximum 5 attendees. What I got was that each person that signed up could add 5 people. What I want is that the event only lets 5 people total book on that event. Not sure what the best solution is here with that and staff assignments which is a whole other issue in itself. 

[#12]

@mmaxey new to bookings, trying to set a search room to only allow 4 people in the space at 3 hour sessions to one staff member. What am I missing?