The “Appointment Types” tab lets you specify which types of appointments your clients can book with you .
If “Single Option” is chosen for “Types Available” then your clients will not have a choice when booking with you. When they visit your booking page, they will be taken directly to the “Availability” screen where they can choose a time.
If “Multiple Options” is chosen for “Types Available”, then your clients will first be asked to choose a type of appointment before they can choose a time.
Appointment Type Fields
Each appointment type has the following fields:
- Label: The label is the name of the appointment type
- Direct Url: The Direct Url field lets you specify the code used to link directly to this type of appointment. This is also the field that is made available in the {{ type }} field in the event template and message templates.
- Description: The Description field is shown to the user when they are asked to choose what type of appointment they would like to book
- Action: The Action option tells Apptoto what action to take when a client selects this type of appointment. The available options are:
- Show availability: This is the default and standard “Action” option. If a client selects the appointment type, then the Booking Page progresses to the next step in the booking process, which is to show them times that are available for this type based on the settings below.
- Link to another page: This action results in the client being sent to a different website. Typically this is used to send the client to a different Booking Page. This is commonly used when you need to customize the Booking Page settings for a specific Appointment Type (beyond what you can customize per standard Appointment Type)
If Action is set to Show Availability then the following options appear:
- Calendars: This option appears if Multiple Calendar Support is enabled for this booking page. If it is, then you can choose between “Default”, which or “Customized”. “Customized” lets you specify different calendars for each type of appointment type. E.g. you could have one appointment type that places appointments on once calendar, and another appointment type that places appointments on another calendar or calendars.
- Appointment Length: The duration of the appointment in minutes.
- Time Padding: This is the amount of time you need before and after an appointment to prepare. For example, entering 10 minutes would result in the client not being able to book an appointment of this type 10 minutes before or after any other meeting.
However, if Action is set to Link to another page, then the following options are available:
- Link to: This option will let specify which of your other Booking Pages to link to, or you can select “Custom” and enter in a specific url. The benefit of choosing a Booking Page, is that if the Booking Page’s url changes for some reason then this link will be kept up to date.
The Link to another page option is commonly used if the standard Show availability options are not expressive enough for what you are trying to achieve. For example, the Show availability options for each Appointment Type do not allow you to specify a different availability schedule, so what you can do is create another Booking Page with the desired availability schedule and link to it from the original Booking Page.
How to put appointments on different calendars depending on appointment type
As noted above, each Appointment Type can have it’s own customized “Calendar” settings. One use case of this is to have different calendars for different appointment types. For example, if you have a calendar for your “Sunnyvale” location, and a calendar for your “San Francisco” location, then you can set up one booking page with two different appointment types. One for “Sunnyvale” and one for “San Francisco”. Your client can then choose which location as the first step in the booking process.
The trick is to then set the Calendars setting to “Customized” for each appointment type, and check only the calendar for appointment type’s location.
