Keep bookings grouped together by turning on the Minimize Gaps in Your Schedule setting, allowing you to make the most out of your time by avoiding large gaps between your appointments and appearing busy and in demand.
Here's how it works:
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First Booking: If no appointments are scheduled for the day, your first customer will see your full availability. Once that first spot is booked, whether by you or the customer, the Minimize Gaps in Your Schedule setting takes effect.
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Cluster Booking: When customers book appointments, the timeslots they see will group around any appointments on your calendar. Nobody wants to have to wait idly for hours until the next appointment.
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Only Applies Within Working Hours: Vagaro clusters availability around appointments and personal tasks only during your set working hours. For example, if you add a personal task outside of your working hours, it won’t affect the availability shown to customers.
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Online Booking Only: This setting only applies to online bookings. You can still schedule customers in-house as you normally would.
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Look Busy: Sometimes, customers can be put off when you're entire schedule is open. This setting helps you appear busier and in demand by hiding availability on your calendar.
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Considers Cleanup Time: Vagaro will consider any cleanup time added to the end of your appointment and will adjust the available timeslots accordingly.
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Personal Tasks: Available timeslots will cluster around Personal tasks only if they block online booking and there is another appointment scheduled for that day
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Waitlist: If someone is on your automated waitlist, they will be notified as timeslots open up.
Note
This setting may limit the number of available times shown to customers. To avoid this, make sure that Search Appointment Interval in your Online Appointment Rules is lower than the gap time you enter and you've allowed for enough timeslots in the Appointment Search Limit. These settings may conflict with the gap you set.
Prerequisites: This feature is available for all Vagaro businesses.
To turn on the feature:
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Go to Online Appointment Rules:
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Phone: Select More
→ → .
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Computer, Tablet, Pay Desk, or PayPro: Select Settings
→ .
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Turn on Minimize Gaps in Your Schedule. Turning on this setting will show additional options.
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In Avoid Gaps Greater Than, enter how much of a gap you want, from No Gaps to Two Hours.
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In Employees, select the employees you want this setting to apply to.
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Select Save.
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Legend: |
Available Time Slot |
Booked Time Slot |
Hidden Time Slot |
Let’s say you want to avoid gaps longer than one hour in your schedule. You’ve configured the setting so appointment timeslots open every 30 minutes.
Your Setup:
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Avoid Gaps Greater Than: One hour
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Search Appointment Interval: 30 minutes
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Service Duration: 30 minutes
Here's how that would look when a customer tries to book.
|
No Appointments |
First Appointment Booked at 11:00 AM |
Second Appointment Booked at 12:30 PM |
|---|---|---|
|
9:00 AM |
9:00 AM |
9:00 AM |
|
9:30 AM |
9:30 AM |
9:30 AM |
|
10:00 AM |
10:00 AM |
10:00 AM |
|
10:30 AM |
10:30 AM |
10:30 AM |
|
11:00 AM |
11:00 AM |
11:00 AM |
|
11:30 AM |
11:30 AM |
11:30 AM |
|
12:00 PM |
12:00 PM |
12:00 PM |
|
12:30 PM |
12:30 PM |
12:30 PM |
|
1:00 PM |
1:00 PM |
1:00 PM |
|
1:30 PM |
1:30 PM |
1:30 PM |
|
2:00 PM |
2:00 PM |
2:00 PM |
|
2:30 PM |
2:30 PM |
2:30 PM |
|
3:00 PM |
3:00 PM |
3:00 PM |
|
3:30 PM |
3:30 PM |
3:30 PM |
|
4:00 PM |
4:00 PM |
4:00 PM |
Comments
13 comments
So say you have a full open book, will it show any time slots? Just the first and last?
Will clients have the options to click a button to ‘see more times’ if the ones clustered close to existing appointments don’t work for them? This would be useful so we still get the booking even if the attempt to optimize efficiency was in place. I’ve seen this as a feature in Jane App and ClinicSense online booking
Hi Jessica, if you have an open book, it'll show all your availability. As soon as one appointment is booked, it'll narrow down your availability to cluster around that appointment.
Thanks, Jamie
Hi Tanya, that's currently not a feature. But I forwarded your feedback over to our product team.
Thanks, Jamie
Thanks Jamie
Will there ever be an option to turn this feature on only for certain days? During the week we are fine with an open schedule, but on Saturdays we try to cluster book as much as possible.
Hello, while I can't guarantee that this will change, we do listen to our customer feedback. I recommend submitting a feature request because it helps our product team know how many users have requested a feature.
https://support.vagaro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021060374-Submit-a-New-Feature-Request
Thanks, Jamie
Let’s say I have it setup as they do in the example and I have a client a first client at 11am but someone is trying to book a 2 hour appointment around that. Would that open up that 9am slot?
Hi Savannah,
Yes, that's exactly right! The system considers the duration of the service as well.
Thanks, Jamie
I have a recurring lunch break as a personal task set every day. Does that mean that someone booking the first appointment of a day will only see the appointments available around that lunch break?
Hi Liza, that's currently how it works, but we've received feedback on this issue and are working on a fix. We will modify the logic so that availability clusters around personal tasks only if there's at least one booking scheduled for the workday.
Thanks, Jamie.
Will there be an update so that we can have it ignore the Personal Task times and focus on when a previous appointment was booked? For example, I've blocked off the last 2 hours of my day and have a client booked at 11am. I would prefer it only shows potential clients clusters around 11am and not the last two hours of the Personal Task time at all
Hi Kelly,
There aren't any plans to change this setting, but we take feedback very seriously. I recommend submitting a feature request for our product team: https://support.vagaro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021060374.
Thanks.
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