Our Group Bookings feature is best for accommodating up to 50 people in the same time slot. It's perfect for webinars, information sessions, recruitment pools, and so much more.
Follow this guide to easily set up the maximum group size on your booking page. You'll also learn how to manage the number of spots each booker can reserve and understand how group bookings impact your existing calendar events.
This feature is available on our Individual, Professional, and Team plans.
- How to enable group bookings
- Allow your booker to reserve more than one spot at a time
- How group bookings work with your calendar
- How group bookings appear in your calendar
- Share a static video link for group bookings
- Referencing slots booked in emails & SMS
- Adjust the number of available slots
- Reduce or completely block the number of available slots
- Use Calendar Managed Availability to define available slots
How to enable group bookings
1. For the booking page where you want to offer group bookings, Navigate to Additional options > Availability rules, and click Group bookings.
2. In the pop-up modal, decide if you would like to add a question to your booking form so your bookers can reserve more than one spot in a single reservation.
3. Set the number of bookings you want to take in each available time slot and save all changes.
4. Check "Show remaining availability on booking page" to show the remaining available bookings for each time slot.
Allow your booker to reserve more than one spot at a time
When you activate Group Bookings on your booking page, you're prompted to add a question to your booking form that allows your booker to reserve more than one spot at a time.
The question can be found under Booking form Questions, with the label "How many would you like to book?" You can modify this label to make the question more relevant to what your booker is reserving, such as "How many people are in your group?"
The number of slots available to your booker will depend on the number of bookings you've already received, along with other existing busy events on your calendar in that same time slot.
The number they select from this dropdown will adjust any set price for bookings.
If you want your bookers to take one of the available slots only, delete the question from your booking form using the trash bin icon. To re-add the question, navigate to Availability rules, and click "Clear" to remove the setting and start over.
How group bookings work with your calendar
When you set up a booking page for group bookings, you'll need to think about how existing events on your calendar affect your availability.
Existing events
Existing events (meetings & appointments added to your calendar outside of YouCanBookMe) will take up one of your available booking slots.
That means if you set your group size to 5, any existing event that is set to busy in your calendar will take up one of the slots and there will be 4 remaining. YouCanBookMe will still allow you to be booked on top of your team meeting.
To avoid being double booked, you'll either need to fully block time on your calendar so YouCanBookMe won't display that time for booking, or use Calendar Managed Availability to define your availability just when you're free on your calendar.
Checking multiple calendars for conflicts
Contrarily, If you are checking multiple calendars for mutual availability, busy events across all those calendars will take up available booking slots and affect how many bookings you can take.
That means if you've set units per slot to 5 and you have 2 busy events across two of your calendars, YouCanBookMe will only allow a total of 3 bookings in a time slot, as the other 2 slots have been taken by your busy events.
How group bookings appear in your calendar
As you receive each booking in your open time slot, it will appear as an individual event in your calendar. After your set number of bookings has been received, that time will no longer be available for booking in YouCanBookMe.
Share a static video link for group bookings
The integrations with Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams do not currently support group bookings. You won't be able to generate a unique meeting link for your group bookings.
To have everyone appear in the same room at the same time, share a static video conference link that everyone can join. You can add this link to your calendar event location and in your confirmation & reminder emails.
Referencing time slots booked in emails & SMS
Using the Shorthand Code {UNITS}, you can reference the number of slots a booker has reserved in a single booking. Use this shorthand code anywhere you want to display the number of slots booked.
For example:
- Your confirmation email can include the line "You've reserved {UNITS} spots for the training on {START-DATE}."
- The calendar event title can say "{FNAME} booked {UNITS} spots" to show at a glance how many spots have been booked on your linked calendar.
Adjust the number of available slots
You can adjust the number of slots a single booking has taken on your bookings page.
Click on the booking you need to adjust, go to Additional options > Availability rules > Maximum group size, and adjust the number to be any number between 1 and 50.
Editing the number of slots booked will not change the price the booker paid if you are charging for bookings.
Correct a booking that took more than one slot
Your client booked 1 slot, but meant to book 2? Go to your Bookings to edit the Maximum group size from 1 to 2.
Reduce or completely block the number of available slots on a specific day(s)
When using group bookings, your booking page will only show a time as unavailable if all of those possible slots have been filled with bookings or other busy events on your calendar.
Want to take fewer bookings in a certain time slot? Add YCBM-UNITS-X to the event title of any busy event on your calendar where X is the number of slots you want to block from being booked.
Want to fully block out a time when you have another meeting and can't take any bookings, add YCBM-UNITS-X or YCBM-OVERRIDE-UNITS into the event title of the busy event on your calendar. Please be aware that only one event containing this title can be set per day. Multiple events will be ignored by our system.
In this example, YCBM will block your availability from 2:00pm-3:00pm.
Manage a staffing shortage
You are taking 10 bookings per time slot, but on Friday morning, you can take only 5 bookings. Add a busy event with YCBM-UNITS-5 in the title of the event. This will block out 5 slots and only leave 5 left for booking.
Use Calendar Managed Availability to define open slots
Instead of adding YCBM-OVERRIDE-UNITS to all of the busy events in your calendar to prevent yourself from being double booked, use Calendar Managed Availability.
Calendar Managed Availability allows you to define exactly when you're available for bookings, and only that time is displayed for booking. When you want to remove a time slot from being booked, just delete that Calendar Managed Availability event from your linked calendar.
For further questions, contact our team at support@youcanbook.me.
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