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Question

How to guarantee paid event slots

  • 9 June 2024
  • 5 replies
  • 26 views

I have a paid Calendly account, collecting payments for various events with Stripe. I need a way of ensuring that one or more Group events’ slots are always scheduled even if no one has purchased a seat.

E.g., is there anyway to lock a group event’s slots even if no one signs up? I want the event to run, with a Zoom session scheduled -- even with zero bookings.

Someone asked a similar question here e

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But the answers were insufficient. The requirement seems simple enough. I’ll describe the situation in greater detail with an example approximating my situation.

 

I have multiple paid Group event types with 20-50 attendees max per slot, 1-4 slots per week - all held over Zoom. I need to ensure these slots (maybe 20 per week total across all Group types).

I also have multiple paid 1-on-1 types of lower priority that are from 8am to 10pm daily. Those function fine, but I don’t want one of these clients being able to book when a Group event should be on.

I don’t care if a Group event has zero bookings; I still want all them to have a Zoom session created, with details. But the only way I can see how to do that is that I sign up for and pay for my own events. That would be thousands of dollars per week I have to pay to “lock” the Group slots.

Is there anyway to lock a group event’s slots even if no one signs up, without having to pay? 

 

Hey there @rajkdash - so sorry for the delay! I posted a response to this for you a few hours ago, and it somehow vanished into the interwebs! So, let’s try this again. 

Firstly -- I am sorry to say that as of now, there is no easy way to book your own event type/lock it down in the manner you’re hoping to without paying the amount you have set up, if you are going directly to your own booking page the way you’d expect to. 

That said, there is a viable workaround I can suggest! It would look like: 

  • use our Customize Once and Share tool to set up a single-use link for yourself
  • within this single-use link version of your event type, you can make changes to the settings that will apply only to this link (customize once)
  • remove the payment collection setting from your customized version 
  • copy the single-use link for yourself > visit the link > book that event for yourself
  • the original event type will remain as is with the payment collection turned on for any invitees that might book

I know this isn’t perfect, but it’s a means to an end for your goal! You can use the customize once and share tool to remove the payment collection setting and book that event for yourself quite easily. 

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions, and I’ll be here!

Thanks for the detailed response and the time you spent answering. Much appreciated

 

That is nuts. By end of year, I’ll have 12 different workshops every week, each with 1-4 slots per week. Unless I misunderstand, I’m going to have to do this 20-30 times every week of the year. Absurd.

 

I’m a retired software dev with 40+ yrs experience. If your s/w dev team can program in teams, they can program in an override that a paid event creator doesn’t need to buy their own events. All the dev team have to do is add a changeable flag variable for a group event (paid or not), to make the event as “booked”, and a Zoom email generated and sent to the event creator.

I’m not saying this can be done in a day, but given the dev team isn’t going to do 100% off coupons (from other community posts), this would be a much simpler workaround, with minimum changes to Calendly’s customer events database.

 

If there isn’t an easier way, I may have to look at other solutions.

Hey again @rajkdash -- thanks so much for following up. I appreciate the comprehensive feedback, here, truly. I will make sure our product team is looped in + will include this feedback in our monthly report. I wish I could guarantee updates/implementation based on that + give a timeline, but I can’t. I’m sorry!

I understand the need here, truly. We get questions similar to this a lot -- and we are pushing that feedback along each time! 

I hope you have a good day. 

Thanks, Kelsi.

That you get them a lot is a hint that people need the feature. Whomever the product or portfolio manager on Calendly features is needs to realize it’s a basic expectation that someone may want to have fixed slots regardless of # of bookings.

Here is the simplest solution: Creating an Availability schedule and applying it.

 

So for my paid workshops, I create a name Availability schedule with the all the time clusters throughout each day that I am NOT giving workshops. Then I select all my 1-on-1 coaching event types that I don’t want booking during workshops and apply the new named Availability schedule.

This approach effectively acts in ensuring that my workshop times are fixed and no one other than workshop attendees can book during workshop time slots. It’s a bit of work, but not too bad, and I don’t have to buy my own workshops.

Note: a given workshop Zoom session only gets created if one or more people book and pay. But the functionality I want (e.g., locked time slots for paid group events) is satisfied. And I can still put in the 1-1 coaching events general availability of something like 10am-10pm, knowing there’s the applied Availability override.

Calendly has an article on how to set and apply Availability:

https://calendly.com/blog/getting-started-availability

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