New Availability Feature

Hi @Cavendish!

Just a quick FYI that I split your post off the community feedback thread and into a new thread here. That other thread was aimed at feedback on this brand new community platform, while your reply is on the new availability feature. All good! Just makes the two conversations a bit cleaner and less confusing for all involved. 😁

Can you elaborate on the “different experience”? Would love to hear more about what you liked in the previous version versus the new one!

Oops. Apologies for that.

Sure thing. With the previous version, I would click on availability, select the day that I want to block my availability, remove the time range selected and save. Pretty quick and simple. With the new version, I approached it with the same mentality(I actually accessed calendly today to block my availability on Friday). I struggled at first to locate where the availability section was but after finding it, there were subsections in it (Calendar sync, Default Hours and Holiday), so I explored each section to see where I needed to go to block my availability. Couldn't immediately find that so I kinda froze for a moment. 

After some time, I realized in the holiday section that's where I needed to add an out-of-office event but do so on my synced calendar and not on calendly. It's not really obvious at first that this is what we are suppose to do but when you read the tip, it starts to make sense(if the tip was not there, I would be lost till now.)

Thanks for the quick response and the heads-up @jillian 

No apologies needed. It’s all good! I’m here to direct traffic. 🚦

As for the feedback, got it. I’m glad you were inevitably find what you were looking for, but we definitely don’t want you freezing for a moment. And good to know the tip helped!

I’ve passed the feedback along to my peers in product and I’ll let you know if they need anymore detail.

Hey @Cavendish! We have seen a lot of confusion and frustration specific to the new availability changes in the redesign! Good news is that our product team is reassessing that and deciding on next steps! You should still be able to block your availability within Calendly - but - if you want to block it in a way that applies to all event types and not on your default hours - your connected calendar is a great tool in that manner.

For now, as it applies to the changes currently in place, here’s what I can tell you! The Calendly product team has decided to migrate from Schedules to Default hours. Default hours are designed to be a simplified way to set availability for all event types at the account level. Along with this change, we have also enabled the ability to set up your Holidays within Calendly. While Default hours & Holidays will be assigned to all new event types created and team events, Calendly will still allow for further changes to be made to your availability within each event type. When it comes to setting date overrides, that will need to be done in event specific availability using custom hours - for now! 

We understand change isn't easy and can sometimes be disruptive to your workflow within Calendly. We are taking all of the feedback we receive about this change seriously - while @jillian has passed along this feedback, don’t ever hesitate to reach out to support via live chat (paid plan users) 24/7 or write in at support@calendly.com (all users) any time to offer any more feedback “officially” so we can record it for you! We are listening! 

Thank you @KelsiEllie for the thorough breakdown. This clears out a lot that crossed my mind.