Hey Calpals! I’m sure all of us at one point or another ran into unexpected unavailability on our booking pages. Or maybe you’ve added events in your calendar for a planned vacation or a doctor's appointment, but you were surprised to see that Calendly is still showing you as available.
For both of these situations, I wanted to go over one of the most common reasons for this - Your Calendar’s free/busy status!
Who can use this?
All of Calendly’s calendar connections are available to users on all plans, from Free to Enterprise. Keep in mind that the free version allows for one connection, where our paid plans include up to six!
To learn about the features in each plan, feel free to check out our pricing page!
How Does Calendly Check for Conflicts?
A little bit of background here, once you connect your personal/work calendar through the Calendar sync page, Calendly will essentially sit on top of your external calendar(s). It will then check for any events marked “Busy” and interpret them as a conflict, preventing invitees from scheduling new events at those times. Any events marked as “Free” will be ignored by Calendly.
❗It’s important to keep the Free/Busy status of your events in mind when you're experiencing any unexpected behavior within your booking page.❗
💡Tip: If Calendly is detecting a “busy” event within your calendar, you will see an unavailability error labeled ‘CALENDAR’ when troubleshooting your availability:
Generally speaking, if you’re showing as available when you should be unavailable, or vise versa, I’ve included some instructions for each of our calendar connections on how to check the Free/Busy status of your events below!
If you use the Google calendar connection and you’re experiencing some unexpected behavior, you can follow the steps below to check the Free/Busy status of your calendar events:
- On your computer or mobile device, open Google Calendar.
- Open the event settings of the event you want to check/update.
- Click the box highlighted below and choose your desired status for the event. If you’d like the event to not be detected as a conflict by Calendly, select ‘Free’, otherwise, select ‘Busy’.
- Click Save.
Office 365 / Outlook
Like Google calendars, adjusting the event status on your Office 365/Outlook calendar is pretty straightforward. Just follow these quick steps:
- On your computer or mobile device, open your calendar.
- Select the event you’d like to update.
- Under “Show As” your desired status for the event. If you’d like this to not be detected by Calendly, select ‘Free’, otherwise, select ‘Busy’.
- Save the event.
💡Tip: By default, Calendly considers you as unavailable during events that are marked as Busy, Working Elsewhere, or Away, and those times will not show on your scheduling page.
If you would like to be considered available during statuses other than “Busy”, you can configure these settings by going to your calendar sync page and selecting ‘Edit’ next to the O365 connection under “Check for Conflicts”.
iCloud
Just like the rest of the connections, iCloud events must be marked as "Busy" to appear unavailable on a Calendly scheduling link.
However, accessing this option is a little more difficult for iCloud calendars. The "Busy" option won’t appear for iCloud calendars on the desktop iCal app or the icloud.com web calendar, so this will have to be updated via iPhone or iPad. Check out the video below for a walkthrough of where to find this setting within the calendar app on an iPhone.
Note: By default, iCloud will set all-day events as “Free”, and events with a given start and end time as “Busy”.
🔁 Recap: If Calendly doesn’t seem to be picking up events from your connected calendar OR if available time appears to be blocked off unexpectedly, looking into your calendar event(s) free/busy status is a great place to start!
There you have it! 🎉 I hope this has helped you learn something new! As always, please let us know if you have any questions - We’re always here to help!