The “Spacing after” setting is used to add time to services for a specific purpose (e.g. to take a break, clean up, process a payment, prepare for your next client, etc.) or, in the case of multi-service booking, to enable you to perform an additional service between services (see "Available spacing").
To access this setting, go to the “Services” tab > {select a service} > “Service details”.
Spacing can be of type “Busy” or “Available”.
Spacing applied to a service will be reflected here:
The spacing will be listed in the calendar tab, as shown below:
“Busy” spacing
“Busy” spacing will extend the time of your service (only visible to you, not to clients), such that clients will not be able to book during that extra time. Consider this example:
Your service is configured the following way:
Duration: 60 minutes
Booking interval: 30 minutes
"Busy" spacing: 15 minutes
Only 1 staff member is assigned to the service. This member is available between 9-5 PM
Online personnel selection mode set to "No personnel selection"
Time selection mode set to "Display time slots with automatic dispatch"
These are the time slots clients will see before any booking is made for the day:
Then, a client books an appointment for 9:00 - 10:00 AM; the next client to open the widget will see these time slots (notice the 15 minutes added for the spacing):
“Available” spacing
This setting is only relevant in the context of multi-service online booking.
“Available” spacing will not extend the time of your booking, such that clients will still be able to book during that extra time; this will allow you to remain available for other clients while an existing appointment is ongoing.
For example:
You operate a hair salon, and provide 2 services: 1) hair coloring treatment (20 minutes) and 2) haircut (20 minutes).
The hair coloring treatment requires your clients to wait for 30 minutes after for the dye to take full effect.
During the 30 minutes mentioned above, you are available to take other clients (for example, for a haircut).
Therefore, you set an available spacing of 30 minutes to your hair coloring treatment service.
Actual scenario:
A client books a hair coloring treatment and a haircut, starting at 1:00 PM; the hair coloring treatment begins at 1:00 PM, and the haircut begins at 1:50 PM (because of the 30 minute spacing). Therefore, the staff member is available between 1:20 PM - 1:50 PM to take another customer.
This time frame will be available for booking in the booking widget.
Multi-service booking example
To understand the difference between the types of spacing, here is the outcome of the spacing types applied to the the scenario mentioned above:
With available spacing, the staff member is available to perform another service (of 30 minutes or less) between 1:20 - 1:50 PM.
With busy spacing, the staff member is not available to perform another service between 1:20 - 1:50 PM.
No spacing: no time between services.