Does a Shared Bookings page consider staff availability from their Outlook calendar for multi-day services?

Hi @cdo33, 

Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A forum. 

I understand how important it is to ensure that staff availability is accurately reflected when offering services over a specific date range. I appreciate the steps you've taken so far and the effort you've made to manually manage availability. 

Microsoft Bookings does allow you to define service availability and sync staff calendars. However, for multi-day services, the system currently does not fully account for personal calendar events, even when the “Events on Office calendar affect availability” option is enabled. 

This means that appointments may still be booked during times when staff are unavailable due to meetings or off-hours, even if those times are blocked in their Outlook calendars. The message you noticed: “Please note, personal calendar availability will not be accounted for in multi-day services”, is accurate and reflects a current limitation in the product design. 

To ensure Bookings respects staff availability during a specific date range, here’s what we recommend: 

1/ You can try to set up the service availability.  

This is already what you did correctly:  

• General Availability should be set to "Not Bookable."  
• Custom availability for the service was added during the period of October 6–31.  

This step guarantees the service is available just within the time period you have specified. 

2/ You’ve also enabled “Events on Office calendar affect availability,” which is the correct setting. 

However, for multi-day services, this sync may not block off time as expected. To address this: 

3/ To ensure staff are not booked during unavailable times: 

• Go to Bookings > Staff > Select Staff Member. 
• Click Add Time Off for each day or time block when the staff member is unavailable. 
• Repeat this for each staff member as needed. 

This manual entry ensures Bookings respects their availability even for multi-day services. 

4/ If staff have consistent working hours: 

• In the Staff settings, uncheck “Use business hours.” 
• Set custom working hours directly in Bookings. 

This step helps Bookings better align with actual availability. 

Moreover, the current design of Bookings prioritizes service-level availability over dynamic calendar sync for multi-day services. While calendar sync works well for single-day or hourly services, it may not fully block off time for longer durations. 

As a forum moderator, I hope you understand that I don’t have the ability to modify or escalate product issues directly. However, I strongly recommend submitting your feedback through the Microsoft Teams · Community portal. This is the most effective way to ensure your voice reaches the product team and can be considered for future improvements.   

You've clearly identified a real-world challenge, and your suggestion reflects a deep understanding of user needs - feedback like yours is truly valuable and helps shape the future of Microsoft Teams.  

Sharing your experience through this channel is one of the most effective ways to advocate for improvements that benefit both you and the broader community. Once you’ve submitted your feedback, feel free to share the link here. I’d be happy to upvote it to help increase its visibility.  Additionally, many users have raised similar concerns but may not know where to provide feedback. If my response has helped clarify the situation and guide you toward a next step, please consider marking it as the “Accepted Answer.” Doing so will pin this post to the top, making it easier for others facing the same issue to find and support your feedback. 

Thank you again for taking the time to raise this important usability concern.