Hey there @2Realist4U -- thanks for your post, and great question!

The bad news is that currently, Calendly does not support booking meetings that cross-over the midnight hour. There is not currently a workaround for this other than starting a meeting at midnight. 

The good news is you do not need to do what you are doing to allow your clients in other time zones (to include over in Africa!) to book with you at any hour! 

Calendly intelligently detects the time zone of your invitees based on their device settings. When they visit your scheduling page, your availability will be displayed in their time zone. This means that you can set up your event type availability (read more here: Availability Schedules) in your time zone with your actual available hours (be that 9 to 5 or something else) and your clients in Africa will see the open time slots in their own time zone on your booking page. You do not need to adjust for them by setting up meetings for yourself, in your time zone, in the middle of the night. Calendly will handle that for you! 

If it is your goal to only have in-person meetings, then you will want to lock the way time zones appear to your invitees. You can learn more about Calendly's time zone settings here. 

I hope this helps!

Hi Kelsi! Thanks so much. 

That is exactly what I am trying to do: "set up your event type availability... in your time zone with your actual available hours".

I apologize that I'm seem to be missing something you're telling me; how do I make my "actual available hours" available from 11pm - 3am EST?

When I go into: Event > Available Hours > Custom Hours... I am running into the exact same issue -- people in Africa can't schedule an appointment from 6am - 10am (11pm - 3am EST).

Thanks so much for any help you can offer.

Hey again @2Realist4U -- thanks for coming back!

What I meant when I said that (setting up your availability for when you are actually available), I was more leaning towards the “during normal business hours” side of things. This is my mistake, as I was assuming you’d be able to set up availability for daytime/evening hours and allow your clients in Africa to schedule within them (using the booking page function that will auto-translate the hours into their own timezone). 

There is not a way to set availability across the midnight hour right now, as said above. The only workaround here would be some variation of what you are already doing, but the break will have to be midnight. So, you can set up availability to midnight and starting at midnight, but not through midnight (if that makes sense). 

I’m sorry! 

I wonder if there’s any creative problem solving we could do here…

What would happen if I were to temporarily change my time zone in Calendly, to Africa’s, create the availabilities, and then switch back to my own time zone?

Perhaps between Outlook, Calendly, and the different time zones in both, there’s some sort of workaround the techs could think of?

I really appreciate your help on this Kelsi! I hope you have a great weekend.

@2Realist4U switching your timezones back and forth won’t do anything but cause you confusion.

What you could do is create an event type specifically for your clients in Africa and set the availability for that event type to their time zone, if you’d like. Then, you’ll know what times they’re booking for themselves and it’ll translate to your time when booked (on the “scheduled events” tab > “upcoming” > “details” it’ll show your time zone and then the invitee’s). 

If you do this, you can make the event type secret and Share Your Calendly Link for the ET with the invitees that need it, or, embed it on whatever webpage they’re visiting. 

Alternatively you could set up a Calendly Routing Form that directly routs to the ET for clients in Africa. 

All that said -- at the end of the day, no matter what timezone you have set up, your ET cannot be booked over midnight. If you are in a timezone in which that would be required, there won’t be a workaround outside of splitting it up at midnight. I’m really sorry! 

Hope this helps somewhat! 

Well… you’re stinkin fabulous Kelsi!

Now my clients get their own personalized Calendly URL, with their company name in it, AND -- it worked! When they booked 6am - 8am Africa Time, it appeared on my Outlook calendar from 11pm - 1am!

Thanks for being persistent, diligent, and delightful. Here’s to hoping that you have a fabulous weekend.

WARMEST regards,
Scott

PS - For others that stumble upon this thread, I didn’t have to do the “Calendly Routing Form”.

Hey Kelsi, Just an update, my clients have been using it -- everything is working perfectly. Have a great weekend.

So glad to hear this! I hope your weekend went well, too!