Buffer time between appointments — Help

A booking page that offers back-to-back slots publishes a diary nobody can actually work. A client takes 10:00 for a viewing, the next client takes 10:30 the moment it ends, and in the real world the first one is still asking about parking at 10:35 while the second is standing in reception. Tastings run over. Rooms need resetting. Someone has to walk back from the far end of the building.

Buffer between appointments is the setting that fixes it. You pick a number of minutes, and 1pm keeps that much time free either side of every appointment, so the times on offer are ones you can genuinely keep.

Setting it

Open the Space under Spaces and find the Appointments panel. Buffer between appointments sits directly under Appointment length, because it reads as a modifier of it.

The choices are no buffer, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 45 minutes, or an hour. It saves as soon as you change it, like the rest of the panel.

It is set per Space, not per account, so the room that needs twenty minutes of resetting between tastings and the one you only ever use for a quick phone consultation can carry different numbers.

The default is no buffer. Every Space that existed before this setting arrived carries on offering exactly the times it always did until you change it.

What it does to the times on offer

Without a buffer, 1pm slices each availability window into slots of your appointment length, one after the other. With a buffer, it steps by the length plus the buffer, so the gap is built into the grid.

Take a Tuesday window of 10:00 to 16:00, a 30-minute appointment length, and a 15-minute buffer. The times offered are:

10:00, 10:45, 11:30, 12:15, 13:00, 13:45, 14:30, 15:15

Each appointment is still half an hour. Each one is followed by fifteen minutes that nobody can book. The 15:15 slot runs to 15:45 and is the last one, because a 16:00 start would finish after the window closes.

That last point is worth spelling out: only the appointment itself has to fit inside your window. A buffer that spills past closing time is fine, because it lands in hours you were never offering anyway. A 15-minute buffer does not cost you the final slot of the day.

It works in both directions, and around everything

The gap closes the slot before an appointment as well as the one after it. Booking 11:30 takes 11:15 off the table just as surely as it takes 11:45.

It also holds around appointments you put in yourself, not just the ones clients book. This matters more than it sounds, because your own appointments are not on the grid. Say you add a 90-minute tasting at 13:00 straight from the calendar. With a 15-minute buffer, 1pm treats that appointment as occupying 12:45 to 14:45 for the purposes of the booking page, so no client is offered a time that runs into either end of it.

The gap is projected by the existing appointment, not by whatever the client happens to be trying to book, which is why an off-grid, odd-length appointment of your own still produces the right amount of breathing room either side.

What the buffer is not

It is not part of the appointment. A 30-minute booking with a 15-minute buffer is still a 30-minute appointment. It is stored 10:00 to 10:30, the client's confirmation says 10:00 to 10:30, and the calendar file they add to Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar says the same. Nobody is told to hold 45 minutes of their day for a half-hour viewing.
The client never sees it. There is nothing on the booking page about buffers. They see a list of times, and the times happen to be spaced.
It never stops you. The buffer shapes what the public booking page offers. It is not a rule about your own diary: you can always add an appointment yourself at any time you like, including inside a gap, and 1pm will not argue with you.
It does not pad your events. Events already close appointment slots for the whole of their occupancy, from access to vacate, which is the real footprint of an event on the room. Adding a buffer on top of that would start eating hours nobody asked it to. Event clashes are a separate feature: see preventing a double-booked Space.

Buffer, notice, or a different window?

Three settings shape what the booking page offers, and they answer different questions. Reaching for the wrong one is the usual reason a diary still looks wrong after you have changed something.

Buffer between appointments answers "how much room do I need around each one". Use it when the problem is bookings running into each other.
Notice needed answers "how soon is too soon". It hides every time between now and the notice you set, so nobody grabs a slot in the next hour that you have no chance of preparing for. Pick four hours and the page stops offering the next four hours, whatever day they fall on.
Availability windows answer "when am I open at all". If you find yourself reaching for a very long buffer, what you probably want is a shorter window. An hour of dead time after every appointment is really a shorter working day, and the weekly grid says that far more clearly.

A few things worth knowing

Changing the buffer does not move anything already booked. Existing appointments keep their times. The new spacing applies to what the page offers from that moment on, which means an existing pair of back-to-back bookings can survive a buffer being switched on. That is deliberate: silently shunting a client's confirmed tasting to make the grid tidy would be worse than the untidy grid.
The buffer holds when a client reschedules too. Someone moving their own appointment from the link in their confirmation gets the same spaced list of times, with their current slot still available to them.
Two clients cannot slip through at once. If two people submit at the same moment for times that would breach the gap, only one of them gets it. The other is told the time has just gone and asked to pick another.
A buffer of zero is a real answer. For back-to-back phone consultations where nothing needs resetting, no buffer is exactly right, and it is what every Space starts with.

The rest of the appointment feature, from the booking page itself to video appointments and reminders, is covered in appointments and the booking page.