How Scheduling Works: Meeting Types And Availability

You do not need to learn scheduling jargon. Two questions decide the meeting type:

1. Who hosts the meeting? Only you, any one person from a team, or several people together.
2. How many invitees share one time slot? One person, or many people at the same time.

A webinar is a separate, scheduled one-to-many broadcast with registration. See Event Types for the full setup of every kind.

Both use a pool of hosts, but they do opposite things with it.

• Round-robin is a union. A time is offered when at least one host in the pool is free. Adding a host adds availability.
• Collective is an intersection. A time is offered only when every required host is free. Adding a required host can only remove times, and can take availability to zero.

Worked Example

Three hosts are free on Monday: Ana from 9:00 to 12:00, Ben from 10:00 to 14:00, and Chloe from 11:00 to 15:00.

Every meeting type follows the same steps, in the same order:

1. Find the hosts. Required hosts, plus the pool for round-robin or rotating pools.
2. Start from weekly hours. Each host’s schedule, read in that schedule’s own time zone.
3. Apply date overrides. An override replaces that day’s weekly hours.
4. Remove busy time. Events on the host’s connected calendars, and any buffer you set.
5. Combine the hosts. Union for round-robin, intersection for collective.
6. Cut into bookable slots. Using the event’s duration and start-time interval.
7. Apply your booking rules. Minimum notice, how far ahead people can book, and any event-specific hours.
8. Remove what is already taken. Existing bookings.
9. Apply limits and display. Daily, weekly and total limits, then show the result in the invitee’s own time zone.

The order matters. Hosts are combined before time is cut into slots, and buffers are applied to busy time before slots are generated. That is why a slot that only partly overlaps a busy period is correctly hidden instead of half-offered.

By default, yes, and that is deliberate. Your weekly hours live in a named schedule (for example, “Working hours”). Event types point to a schedule instead of holding their own copy.

• Edit your hours once and every event type that uses that schedule updates.
• If one event needs different hours, assign it a different schedule, or lock custom hours for that event only. The change stays with that event.
• In team events, hours can be locked for the whole event, or for a single host, and the two settings are independent.

Step by step: Availability & Schedules.

They replace. A date override swaps out the weekly hours for that date completely. It does not add to them.

• An override with custom hours means only those hours are offered that day.
• An override with no hours means unavailable all day.
• Overrides apply per schedule, so a vacation override can block your paid-session schedule while your discovery-call schedule stays open.

Learn more in Availability & Schedules.

Bookme reads busy time from every calendar you connect, so a personal calendar can block your bookable hours. New bookings are written to one designated calendar.

• Connect the calendars that hold your real commitments so they block time, even if you never want bookings written to them.
• Buffer before and buffer after add padding around a meeting that cannot be booked over.
• Buffers are set per event type, and they shrink the number of slots in a day, so set them on purpose.

See Calendar Integrations for how sync works and how to choose the destination calendar.

Duration is how long the meeting lasts. The start-time interval is how often a slot can begin. They are independent settings.

• A 30-minute meeting on 15-minute intervals offers 9:00, 9:15, 9:30 and so on.
• The same meeting on 30-minute intervals offers only 9:00, 9:30, 10:00.
• Larger intervals make the booking page feel calmer and push meetings into natural blocks.

Bookme only cuts slots from time that survived the earlier steps, so intervals never create times you are not free.

Four rules trim the list of slots after they are generated:

• Minimum notice. Slots that start sooner than now plus your notice are hidden.
• Maximum days ahead. How far into the future invitees can book.
• Daily, weekly and total limits. Once a limit is reached, remaining slots for that period disappear. If you set several, the strictest wins.
• Per-host limits in round-robin. Each host’s own limits apply on top of the event’s limits.

Your hours are read in the time zone of the schedule they belong to. Invitees see every time converted to their own zone, and confirmations show both.

• A weekly slot at 9:00 in your zone stays at 9:00 in your zone when clocks change. The hour an invitee sees may shift if their region changes clocks on a different date.
• When hosts of a collective event sit in different time zones, their overlap can shift by an hour while one region has changed clocks and the other has not. Review shared hours around those weeks.

See Availability & Schedules for the full time zone guide.

The times an invitee sees are a fast preview. To keep booking pages quick, availability is remembered for a short period (about two minutes) for each month and time zone. When the invitee confirms, bookme checks the chosen time again.

• If the time was taken in the meantime, the invitee is asked to choose another one.
• When you change something (a new booking, edited hours, a calendar event), the update reaches the booking page within a couple of minutes.
• This check is what prevents double bookings, so a time that vanishes at the last step is the system working as intended.

If it happens often, see Troubleshooting.

Rescheduling does not replay the original options. Bookme calculates availability again under your current rules, with the time being vacated counted as free.

• For events with several hosts, the new times fit all required hosts today, not the times that fit when the booking was first made.
• By default the same host or hosts stay assigned, so the invitee keeps dealing with the same people.
• A cancelled time returns to your availability, and appears on the booking page within a couple of minutes.

See Bookings Inbox for managing bookings.

An empty calendar is almost always the result of two or more rules stacking. Check these in order:

1. Hours. Does the event’s schedule have hours for the days you expect?
2. Overrides. Is a date override blocking those days?
3. Calendar conflicts. Are all-day or long events on a connected calendar blocking everything?
4. Required hosts. In a collective event, is the intersection of everyone’s hours tiny or empty?
5. Notice and window. Is minimum notice too long, or maximum days ahead too short?
6. Limits. Has a daily, weekly or total limit already been reached?
7. Event status. Is the event active and visible on the booking page?

Detailed fixes are in Troubleshooting.

Changing hours, buffers, notice, limits or hosts only affects new times offered. Bookings already made are never moved or cancelled automatically.