Hey, Eric! Great questions and I am happy to answer them, for you!

There might be some confusion regarding what our Collective Event Type is designed for.

Collective Event Types in Calendly are a “multiple host to one invitee” event type. The purpose of these event types is to allow multiple members of a Calendly organization to accept a booking from a single invitee outside of the organization. A great example of what I have seen users implementing Collective Event Types for is panel interviews - many hosts (interviewers) to one invitee (job candidate). I hope this helps make sense of this feature for you! 

You absolutely do not need to pay for additional seats on your plan in order to schedule meetings with multiple colleagues at once. However, if you are hoping to create and book any type of team meeting (as in, host meetings with outside invitees along with colleagues as hosts), you will need to either add them to your Calendly organization or be added to theirs. There is no current plan for allowing team booking without doing this. 

Check out all of the below options, and let me know what you think!

First, you should check out our Group Event Type feature. This allows you to set an invitee limit (per time slot). For example, you can set up a Group ET with a duration of one hour that allows 5 people to join the same time slot, then send the booking link to five colleagues so that you can all meet together.

Secondly, you can check out our Meeting Polls feature!

Here's a great article that explains our Meeting Polls feature!

Once participants have voted in your poll, you can decide on the preferred time to schedule the meeting.

1. In your Calendly account, go to your Scheduled events page.
2. Select the Pending tab.
3. Find your preferred time to have the meeting, and select Book meeting time.
4. Confirm the invitee list looks correct, and then select Book meeting.

After you book
You and your invitees will receive a calendar invitation with the meeting details and location.

Thirdly, you might want to consider the ability to “add additional guests” to one-on-one event types. You can decide if you'd like invitees to add guests as they go through the booking flow. An invitee can add up to 10 guest email addresses when booking an event type. Their guests will be sent a notification about the upcoming meeting. You can view any added guests from the event in your Scheduled Events tab. 

Note: This feature is not available for group event types, since you need to control the number of invitees who can attend a group event at a given time. 
By default, the additional guest feature is turned on. To turn off the ability to add guests:

1. From your event type, select the Invitee Questions section.
2. Hover over the Name fields and select the pencil icon.
3. Deselect Allow invitees to add additional guests.
4. Select Apply.
5. Select Save & Close.

Lastly, you can also always add additional persons to your external calendar events once a booking is made. Example: if your “add to” calendar is a Google Calendar - once an invitee has booked with you, you can then go into the Google Calendar event and add additional guests that will help you host those meetings. 

Thank you @KelsiEllie for the reply.

Yes, I am familiar with those tools. The Team/Collective Meeting for the 2:1 meetings that I hold is the ideal solution. My concern is with the pricing model. 

Let’s say I have ten partners that I work with. If I buy them all licenses it costs me $120 per month, regardless of whether or not they have Calendly licenses. I don’t think this is cost effective and should be reviewed by Calendly.

Ideally each partner would be invited to join calendly as a paying member or use their existing license if they already have one. 

Thanks,

Eric

Eric - I greatly appreciate the further explanation. At this time, there are no plans to allow users to invite additional users to join them via Calendly without paying for their seat/license. When this happens, the persons accepting invites (let’s use your proposed ten colleagues as an example) would give up their own paid plans and join their new organization, where billing is centralized to the owner (the one doing the inviting). This is because all users in an organization must be on the same plan in order to share features, schedule as a team and so on. For example, you would not be able to work with a user that is on our Standard plan if you are on our Teams plan, because the Teams plan offers many features the Standard plan does not. Likewise, a user on our Free plan would not be able to access most features a user on our Standard plan can access. 

For now, the best solution for your use case is going to be either adding teammates to your plan and implementing the tools I mentioned above, or, adding additional hosts to your own external calendar events once bookings have already been made via Calendly. Keep in mind that while billing for multi-person teams will be centralized to the owner, there is nothing stopping you from coming up with an agreement with your teammates (sharing the price in having each teammate added send you the cost of their seat, individually and outside of Calendly). That might be worth exploring as well!

I will make sure this feedback is heard by the right people - I just wanted to be straight forward with you in the meantime. I hope this helps! 

I am having the same issue as Eric.  I am an independent Financial Advisor and one of my colleagues and I share a handful of clients.  My colleague also has his own subscription to Calendly and we would like to be able to schedule meeting with those clients using Calendly.

I understand the reasoning behind not allowing to create an event with somebody who is outside your Team but how about allowing events with non-Team members but only if both parties have the same subscription level? 

Hi @Michael28120,

The ‘same subscription level’ aspect is something we’ve included in our product feedback recently, but no updates or changes quite yet. We’ll keep communicating the need and thank you for providing context regarding your specific use case!