Is there a way to change how the buffer time works?

From my understanding, the buffer time is in place regardless whether the appointment is booked or not. For eg, appointment duration is 1 hour, buffer is 30 minutes before and after, my bookable schedule will look like this: 9am-10am, 11am-12pm, 1pm-2pm and so forth. This is not good for me as lots of time slots in between are now missing.

However, for my use case, I want to be able to set up appointments as follows: 9am-10am, 10am-11am, 11am-12pm etc, and have the buffer time come into effect ONLY if someone books a time slot.

Is there a way this can be done?

Hi again, hope everything is well!

Can I check if there are any updates to this? Amelia is such an amazing plugin but I'm still unable to use it still due to this issue.

I can't really find a usable scenario where i can effectively use your buffer time feature.

If you refer back to my first convo, you notice in my first example that when I use the buffer feature in Amelia, half of my time slots throughout my day will now be unavailable. With most other booking plugins I've tried that offer this kind of buffer feature, the buffer time only becomes active for the particular time slot where someone does a booking. I really believe this is the most sensible way to go about as it does not waste any other time slots throughout the day. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Appreciate if you could really look into this once again, or offer any solutions on how I can use the buffer function effectively.

Regards,

Marcus

I have to agree with Marcus. You are implementing buffer time in a strange way. If I have set up that I have e.g. Wednesday mornings available from 9:00 until 12:30 for a certain service. The service takes 30 minutes. 

The available options in the calendar should be:

09:00
09:30
10:00
10:30
11:00
11:30
12:00

I want to have 15 minutes buffer time between appointments. 

If someone has booked the 09:00 slot, the next available time should be 9:45 and further:

09:45
10:15
10:45
11:15
11:45

So buffer time should only be applied once a certain time slot has been booked.

100% agree with both of you. The way it works right now really messes with the schedule and makes you lose many appointment opportunities. 

In my case, I really need 15-30minutes between appointments, but I guess the only option at the moment is to deactivate buffer time and re-schedule manually. 

@Bodgan can you let us know if this is going to change in the next update or is it going to take longer?

Thank you

it is possible to have shorter buffer times like 5 minutes or 10 minutes?

It's been 8 months and this critical (shouldn't be too hard to fix either) issue hasn't been fixed?

I love Amelia but can the buffer time be fixed? The current system makes no sense!  Why would anyone need 10 hours buffer time after a 15 minute appointment to clean up!!!??? Realistically we would need a option of buffer times of 

5 minutes

10 minutes

15 minutes

20 minutes

30 minutes 

Maximum! I can't image any service business needing longer then this to clean up, set up, rest etc

I didn't need buffer times before, but post COVID-19 lockdown we will need to space out appointments for deep cleaning and social distancing, most businesses will need buffer time, so this is a crucial feature to fix

perfect thanks, that works!