​We have used Microsoft Bookings for several years to let our customers book services with us but we’re noticing a trend that the customers tend to rebook their appointments an excessive amount of times which often leads to available spaces on group bookings being wasted. It also increases the admin time because each rebooking needs to be processed again so that the necessary preparations for the customer can be made.One idea we have to try and keep things under control would be to say that the customers should only book the service one time so that we can administer their bookings one time only and then if they miss their appointment time they could just “drop-in” because all the necessary preparations would have already been made for them. But I don’t think this will change the behaviour with how the customers keep moving their bookings. What we really need is the option to prevent the customers from cancelling or rebooking their times themselves. I am aware that there is an option to “Let customers manage their appointments” but this feature seems to be broken! To disable the option you have to go into the calendar and select the group booking. In the pop-up window underneath the “Added Customers” you can disable the option to prevent the customers from managing their appointments. When you do this it takes away the reschedule and cancel buttons but it only works as a temporary measure because as soon as a new person books a place on the same group booking then the option becomes automatically enabled again! Then all the previous customers can also see the reschedule and cancel buttons again. It feels like this part of Microsoft Bookings is broken and unusable at the moment. The only way I could imagine it working at the moment is if a group booking runs out of free spaces and then nobody else would be able to book a place so if you manually disable the option at this point then would remain disabled for everybody. But until the appointment time runs out of spaces then people are just going to keep moving their bookings around. You could probably keep manually disabling the option when new bookings are made but this also adds to the admin time and it doesn’t seem like a very practical workaround.Another idea we have had is to set a longer “minimum lead time” because this is another way to prevent people from cancelling and moving their bookings but it reduces the flexibility of when the services can be booked. But we’re actually going to try this idea and see how it affects things along with changing the information to try and make the customers aware that they are being restricted to one booking.We hope that the option for the customers to manage their own bookings gets fixed soon. It also does not make much sense that it needs to be disabled per booking in the calendar? Shouldn’t this be a feature that applies to every booking for a service instead?I’ve tried to disable the option on two different booking pages but the experience is just the same, the option just becomes automatically enabled again when a new booking is made.  Read More

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