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meschmid
Community Member
August 13, 2026
Question

Time Zone Issues

  • August 13, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 51 views

Hi all, apologies because I know this has been asked before, and I promise I’ve read every help topic/post I can find, both in the forums here and on Google at large!

I work for a small community college in central North Carolina, but since we are an Army family, we’re currently stationed in Hawaii. Most, but probably not all, of my students are on the East Coast, so they’re operating in EST, while I am in HST. I have been using Calendly for years without any issue (that I’m aware of!) but yesterday a student made an appt for me for 11:45am EST, but his email confirmation read “Thanks for making your appt with Mary at 5:45 HST!” and he texted me in a panic thinking he had to get up at 5:45am to meet with me. If this has been happening with other appointees previously, literally NO ONE has ever mentioned it!

I want to ensure that no student, parent, or other appointee ever sees a reference to HST or Hawaii in my Calendly communications with them; it’s not a secret that I live and work from here, but I’m not trying to broadcast it, either. I also want to avoid any confusion on their part; even though the calendar invites seem to work correctly (most people show up at the correct time for their appts, regardless of both our time zones), I don’t want any mental math on their end to be required or even suggested. I also travel from here a lot so I’m not always even IN Hawaii, but I keep my availability based on the “normal” workday in EST.

Right now, I’ve gone through my settings and erased ever reference to Hawaii- my time zone in my profile is EST, my availability is in EST, etc; I was hoping not to *lock* the event settings for EST in case I do have a student from another mainland time zone, but maybe that’s my only option. My sister (who is physically sitting in NY in the EST time zone) has been my guinea pig this morning as I try to figure this out, and all the confirmation emails she’s getting for her “test” appointments still say HST.

Am I crazy? Is Calendly suddenly fighting some sort of glitch in the last 24 hours? What am I missing here?!

2 replies

David
Community Manager
David
Community Manager
August 19, 2026

Hey ​@meschmid - Sorry for the delay here!

 

You’re definitely not crazy. From what I’ve seen before, this could be caused by your event type’s booking-page time-zone setting or the notification method, not your profile time zone.

Calendly separates:

  • Account time zone: affects how meetings appear to you internally.
  • Schedule/event-type time zone: controls availability and booking-page behavior.
  • Invitee time zone: normally detected automatically from the invitee’s browser/device and used for the booking page and confirmations.

What to check

  1. Go to Scheduling and edit the affected event type.
  2. In Availability, confirm the schedule and event type are set to an Eastern time zone—preferably Eastern Time (US & Canada)
  3. Open More options → Booking page options.
  4. Ensure Lock the timezone is disabled if you want invitees to see their own local time. If you want every communication to use Eastern time, enable it and select Eastern Time.
  5. Check the event type’s Booking notifications setting.

If the event uses Calendar Invitations, Google or Microsoft may add the recipient’s device/calendar time zone to the email subject or invitation, even when Calendly’s event settings are correct. Switching the event type to Email Confirmations is the best test and workaround when you need Calendly’s confirmation to control the displayed time zone.

Also note that changing the account/profile time zone alone does not change the live booking page’s time-zone behavior; that is controlled by the availability and event-type settings.

Afterwards I’d test it again after changing the event type itself, and inspect whether “HST” appears in the actual Calendly email body or only in a Gmail/Google Calendar-generated banner or subject line. If it appears only in the latter, the email/calendar provider is generating it rather than Calendly.

meschmidAuthor
Community Member
August 19, 2026

​@David, thank you so much for your detailed response! I followed your directions and ensured that the Availability for my lone Event Type is in EST. I would prefer not to lock the timezone, only because I occasionally have students who are NOT on the east coast, but I even tried that and my sister in NY (bless her!) is still getting her confirmation email with HST in the headline AND in the body of the email. It seems like the event is going onto both our calendars correctly, but the email confirmation subject line specifically confirms in HST, which will be VERY confusing for my students. 

The emails getting sent to me are correct, with HST showing in the subject line and body of email, so at least that half is correct. I just know that there will be panic and anarchy if my students/parents think they have to log in at 5am to meet with me...

Is there perhaps just a delay in the time it takes for Calendly to “synch up” with my changes?

Below is the email confirmation she forwarded to me after making the appt. Maybe it’s something with *her* settings, but this also happened to a student and another coworker of mine (both in NC) that tried to make appts with me in the last week.

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