Creating one-time meeting links with Zoho Bookings

Want to schedule ad-hoc meetings?
Want to share only a particular time slot for a meeting?
Don't want clients to book with you again?
Don't want to expose your total availability?

And do all this without disturbing your current setup? Dive right in. We'll show you how to schedule One-Time Meetings.

Staff sends a one-time booking page link to the invitee.
Booking page link expires once an appointment is booked.
Invitees can book next appointment only when staff shares a new URL.
Invitees cannot share your availability with people you do not know.

Can we do this in Zoho Bookings? Unfortunately no. Not at the moment. Though one-time meeting links are on our roadmap, we don't wish to stall our customers.

So here's our workaround for one-time meeting links with a little bit of manual effort.

Create a service specific to one-time meeting links.
Mark this service as private. It makes sure that the service isn't listed under any workspace.
Navigate to the service booking URL. Click Customize.
Change the last portion of the URL to the following format.

For example, if you send an appointment link on May 01, 2023, to a customer called Robert James, your code would look like this - D010523TROBE. It ensures that none of the one-time URLs overlap with each other.

Voila, your one-time booking link is ready. Once a customer books using this link, you can modify it and send it again to another customer. The following is how the flow would look like,

Check out the video below for more details,

Important Notes

Let's assume we send the URL to customer 1. If customer 2 asks for a one-time link, don't modify the URL before customer 1 books. Once customer 1 books an appointment, you can modify it and send it to customer 2.

If multiple customers request a one-time URL simultaneously, you can create another service, repeat the above process, and send the URLs to your customers. Check out the following video for more details.

If two customers ask for a one-time URL simultaneously with the same name, you can add one more letter to the URL. For example, Robert James and Robert Williams are requesting one-time appointment links simultaneously. The following can be the code,

D010523TROBEJ - For Robert James

D010523TROBEW - For Robert Williams

It's not mandatory to follow the naming convention, but we recommend you do so to avoid the overlap of using the same booking page link.

Taking complete control over one-time meetings

If you wish to power over your availability, here's how you should do it.

Navigate to Service Notifications > Available Date Range.
Set it to a date/ date range you want your customer to book. Double click to select a single date/ choose a date and drag the slider to choose a range. Once you've chosen your preferences, click on select and finally 'Save.'
Now click on available Times. Choose custom time.
Here you can define your time slot and allow people to book appointments depending on your preferences.

Check out the following video for more details.

With this method, you can generate one-time meeting links through Zoho Bookings. If you've any queries, drop them in the comments. We'll be happy to help you out.

I want to try this!

Zoho Desk Resources

Desk Community Learning Series
Digest
Functions
Meetups
Kbase
Resources
Glossary
Desk Marketplace
MVP Corner
Word of the Day

Topic Participants
Siva

Sticky Posts
Announcing: custom color palette + free workshop
Hello everyone, We're excited to share new feature in Zoho Bookings—a color palette within booking page themes. You'll find this option under Manage Bookings > Workspaces > Booking Page Themes. You can customize the color of every element in your booking page and even alter the transparency of your background image. Please note that this is a paid feature included in the Basic and Premium plans. At the moment, it's available only under the Modern Web theme. This means you can create billions (7,
Complete walk-through of Zoho Bookings (video)
Save time for both you and your customers. Use Zoho Bookings, the appointment scheduling app from Zoho, to free yourself from email and paper-based scheduling. Zoho Bookings can give you a common calendar by syncing multiple calendars, including yours and your staff's. Your customers can book a time convenient for them, and pay for services, through your website or the customizable webpage features available in Zoho Bookings. They'll also get emails reminding them about their appointments and any
New Features: Service Availability and staff booking page themes!
Dear All, Want a dedicated schedule for your one-on-one services? How would it feel to have one-on-one services open for consultations only during certain times? You need a superpower to make that happen and we give it to you - Service Availability is
Zoho Bookings has a new pricing - Pay per user
Dear customers, Businesses around the world use Zoho Bookings. Customers have booked 1.5 million appointments and over 200K online meetings using Bookings. We are only set to cross more milestones, thanks to your support. We are excited to introduce to
Zoho Bookings outage on 30th June in the US data center
Dear customers, While we profusely thank you for your patience when we were busy identifying the issue that caused the outage in our US data center, we sincerely apologize for the trouble it has caused you. It was unfortunate but the events that triggered