Configuring places, rooms and availability

Understanding the three levels of availability

A place is a location with an address. A room is a resource at that place. A member is someone on your team who can deliver the service.

For a time slot to be offered, Bookelio must reconcile the place, the resource and the eligible people. A physically empty room is therefore not enough if the place is closed, no instructor is available or the service's duration does not fit into the remaining window.

In the English menu, open Settings → Places. The bookings module and the appropriate permissions must be available. You will also need Planning → Services to associate rooms and members with the services you offer.

Creating a place

1. Open the list of places and start creating a place.
2. Give it a name that makes sense to the team and customers, such as ‘Main Centre’.
3. Enter the street, building number, postcode, city and country.
4. Add the location's contact details where relevant.
5. If you enter geographical coordinates, provide both latitude and longitude.
6. Save and review the record.

The name identifies the place in selection lists. Avoid several almost identical names if your organisation has multiple sites. A convention such as ‘City — Centre’ makes it easier to select a room and check a booking later.

Geographical coordinates are optional. A latitude without a longitude, or a longitude without a latitude, is rejected. The fields accept decimal values; do not replace these coordinates with the full address. How a map is displayed depends on the public website connected to Bookelio.

Adding rooms

Open room management from the place's row.

1. Add a room and give it a clear name: ‘Consulting Room 1’, ‘Studio’ or ‘Private Space’.
2. If needed, enter the cleaning time after a booking, in minutes.
3. Save.
4. Repeat this for each resource that can actually be booked.
5. Then associate these rooms with the relevant services under Planning → Services.

A room is not a participant capacity. To organise a session with twelve individual places, use group classes and their capacity rather than creating twelve fictional rooms.

Understanding the cleaning interval

Cleaning adds a period of unavailability after a booking. It reserves time to prepare the room again without including that time in the duration advertised to the customer.

If both the room and the service define cleaning time, Bookelio applies the longer duration, not their sum. For example, a room requiring 15 minutes and a service requiring 20 minutes result in a 20-minute buffer. A session ending at 11:00 therefore does not make that resource immediately available again at 11:00.

The booking interval, defined on the service, is another concept: it determines the spacing between the offered start times. See Services and bookings to coordinate duration, booking interval and cleaning.

Setting opening hours and closures

On a place's row, use Manage availability, the action associated with the schedule icon.

1. Enter the usual opening hours in the availability manager.
2. Represent actual breaks, such as a lunch break, in your time windows.
3. Add exceptional unavailability for closure days, building work or collective leave.
4. Check each exception's start and end dates.
5. Save, then check the time slots offered on an ordinary date and on a date affected by a closure.

Exceptional closures avoid changing recurring hours for a one-off absence. Closing a place affects the availability of its rooms; do not use this to represent one member's absence if the rest of the team will continue working.

Changes to opening hours control available time slots. Do not treat them as an action that cancels existing bookings or sends notifications about them. If a change in opening hours affects existing customers, identify their bookings and handle rescheduling or cancellation separately.

Associating people and services

A complete configuration links the right resources:

1. In Places, open the action for managing the place's members.
2. Assign the members who can work there.
3. In Services, associate the usable rooms and the members who can deliver each service.
4. Check individual availability in member management.
5. View the service's time slots again for a specific room and date.

Simply belonging to the organisation does not mean that a member delivers every service. For a public booking, availability depends on eligible people. When creating a booking administratively, your choice of instructor makes the check more specific.

For team access, invitations and availability, see Team and permissions.

Booking several rooms together

A service can use one selected room or occupy all linked rooms together. The second mode is suitable, for example, for exclusive hire that requires several spaces at the same time.

The offered time slots must then be available across all the rooms concerned. A single unavailable room can prevent the complete service from being booked, even if the others are free.

Before choosing this mode, check the list of linked rooms. A room added by mistake can considerably reduce availability. Conversely, forgetting a room that is actually used leaves that resource unprotected against other bookings.

Example of a consistent configuration

You offer a 60-minute service in a consulting room open from 09:00 to 12:00. The assigned member works during that same window. The room requires 15 minutes of cleaning, and the service offers start times at 30-minute intervals.

A booking from 09:00 to 10:00 then keeps the room occupied for cleaning. The next start time must respect both that buffer and the grid of offered times. Adding an exceptional closure from 11:00 to 12:00 may reduce the options further: a sufficiently long free window is needed to accommodate the service under its rules.

Use this example as a checking method: consider each constraint rather than just the apparently empty spaces in the calendar.

Why are no time slots appearing?

Check the following in order:

1. The selected organisation and date are correct; you are not viewing a past date.
2. The service is associated with the room you are looking for.
3. The place has opening hours for the period.
4. No exceptional closure overlaps the time slot.
5. At least one eligible member is available.
6. The service duration, booking interval and cleaning interval leave a genuine opportunity.
7. The ‘Bookable until’ cutoff is not preventing a booking too close to the start.
8. An existing booking or group class is not occupying the room or member.
9. In multi-room mode, all linked resources are available simultaneously.

A pending booking can still block a time slot: it is not equivalent to a cancelled booking. See booking statuses before changing opening hours to solve a problem that actually concerns an existing record.