Calendar shows full availability instead of selecting individual practitioners
Currently, when clients look to book, they have to select which practitioner and then see if they are available when they want a session. Can you make it so the calendar comes up before selecting which practitioner? So clients can book based off their availability.
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Comments1
simon.taylor
Aug 10
Hi Lewis, thanks for posting this; it's a fair ask and one we've thought about, so I wanted to give you an honest picture of why it's more involved in Rehab Guru than it might appear.
Availability in the booking portal isn't a single shared clinic calendar; it's calculated live, per practitioner. When a client picks a practitioner and a service, we work out that person's bookable slots for the month from their working-hours rules, time off, existing appointments and classes, and (where enabled) their synced Google/Outlook calendars, so we never offer a time they're actually busy in.
Showing the full calendar before choosing a practitioner would mean running that calculation for everyone at the clinic and merging the results, which raises a few genuine challenges:
Services aren't uniform across the team. Which appointment types a practitioner offers — and their duration and price — can vary per practitioner and per location. Until we know who the booking is with, we can't reliably say how long the slot runs or what it costs, so a combined calendar has to handle those mismatches carefully.
Who gets the booking? If three practitioners are free at 9am, the merged calendar shows one slot — someone has to decide who it's assigned to. Clinics tend to care a lot about how that's decided (continuity of care for returning clients, fair distribution of new bookings, seniority), so it needs proper assignment rules rather than an arbitrary pick.
Speed and accuracy. Multiplying the availability calculation — including external calendar checks — across the whole team makes the calendar slower to load and harder to keep fresh, and stale combined availability increases the risk of two clients racing for the same slot.
None of this makes it impossible, but the likely shape would be an "Any available practitioner" option for a given service, with clinic-defined rules for who receives the booking, rather than removing practitioner selection entirely. Would that solve it for you, or is the core need seeing all practitioners' slots side by side to compare? Knowing which would help us scope it properly.