How to Block Holiday Dates Without Cancelling Existing Bookings

You are away from the eighteenth. You need the calendar to stop selling those days. What you must not do is disturb the jobs already booked for the week you get back.

It sounds trivial. In most booking tools it is not, and the usual workaround causes the exact problem you were avoiding.

The workaround that bites

The common advice is to deactivate your availability, then turn it back on afterwards. Two things go wrong.

It can affect existing bookings. Depending on the tool, switching availability off does not always leave what is already booked alone. Before you rely on it, find out - ideally not in December.

It does not scale past a couple of areas. If availability is set per area and you serve thirty of them, closing for six weeks means thirty edits, and thirty more to undo. Few people get that right twice.

What you actually want

A closure with three properties:

1. A date range, not a list of days. "The 24th to the 17th" is one fact, not twenty-five.
2. Everywhere at once. You are closed, not closed-in-area-one-and-area-two.
3. New bookings only. Existing appointments stay untouched, and you decide what to do about them.

That last point matters more than it looks. Software should never cancel a customer's appointment as a side effect of a settings change. Tell the owner how many bookings fall inside the range and let them make the calls - that is a judgement, not an automation.

A checklist before you go away

• Block the range, and check the booking page actually refuses those dates
• Check any existing bookings inside the range and contact those customers yourself
• Check the reschedule link too - if customers can move their own appointments, make sure they cannot move one into your closure
• Set an out-of-office on the email address your confirmations reply to
• Diary a reminder to re-open, in case you close an open-ended range

The third one catches people out. Blocking new bookings while leaving the reschedule flow open means a customer can quietly move themselves into the fortnight you are away.

Recurring closures

Public holidays and the Christmas fortnight come round every year. If you are setting them by hand each time, you will eventually forget one and find out from a customer standing on a doorstep.

In ZipScheduler, holidays and closures live in Settings, take a date range, apply to every area at once, and leave existing bookings alone - and tell you how many are inside the range you just blocked. See it in a demo.