Hi, Esther.

Yes, we have two separate booking systems.

We have Services - That is for creating a work schedule for your Employees, assign one or more employees to a Service, then a customer can pick date and time for an appointment.

The appointments are limited to 24 hour duration.

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And Events - They are best if you need the booking to last multiple days, exactly as the use-case you described.

Please check more informations on how to use Events here.

https://wpamelia.com/working-with-events/

And here you can see the difference between Recurring Events and Multi-Day Events :

Recurring VS multi-day events

Let us know if that helps.

Hi, Esther.

No problem, i will do my best to advise you on possible ways to set up your use-case.

- If you add only one employee, the employee selection will not be visible to front-end users.

You can assign this employee to a regular Service, for the Yoga three times a week,

and set up a 'regular work schedule' when she will be available.

Then customers can go to book and choose from her available time slots.

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For the multi-day Event of the Retreat, you can set up an Event , and assign the employee as Organizer or Staff.

Then she will become unavailable for booking in this time that you set of the Event.

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Here is my example with my dummy employee.

If i set up this schedule, let's say if he works each day of the week, hypothetically speaking.

Then, if any customer comes to book, they will see available time slots from 9 till 17 hours each day;

But now if i add this Event, and let'say set it from 20 to 30 June this Year.

Then if a customer tries to book the regular appointments, this time period will become unavailable.

As we pointed out in the Documentation about working with Events,

this option of Staff or Organizer is here if you need to assign some employees to the event.

 The option is not mandatory so you can choose whether you need an employee assigned to the event or not, and you can also assign multiple employees. 

Once you assign the employee that will be shown in his calendar and that employee will become unavailable for appointment bookings at that time.

 However, if some appointment has already been booked and you scheduled the event after, 

the event and appointment will be at the same time, so pay attention to this.

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So, if you will always know in advance when these retreat Events will be, and keep attention to the scheduled appointments, you should not have any issue.

Let me know if that helps.

You can also manipulate the employees schedule in more details, such as adding Special Days ( this can allow you to create custom working hours for specific days / or date range, which is different than the regular schedule),

you can also add vacation / time off / etc.

Please check more about configuring Work Schedule  here.

Let us know if you have additional questions about this.

Hi, Esther.

Yes, the double booking is what we wish to avoid in this scenario.

That is why i suggested to add her as Employee to the Service, 

but also add her as employee to the Event, as Organizer of the Event.

When you add her as the Organizer of the Event - then this time of the 7 days of the Event will become blocked from the appointments of the regular Service,

as from my example, if i set the Event from 20th to 30th - and customer tries to book an appointment for the Service, it will be busy from the Event  :

and nobody will be able to book her for the Service, when she is assigned as Organizer ( or Staff) to the Event.

She will also get Emails about the Event in this way - if someone books a ticket for the Event, you can customize the Employee Notifications of the Event / same goes for Services,

so she will also get automatic notifications for both.

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The only issue that can happen is, for example, if you allow customers to be able to book ahead for a very long time and you don't set up the Events ahead of this time.

Let's say this situation,

 if you allow customers to book ahead 365 days for the Service ( Find this option in Amelia general settings/Period Available for Booking in Advance.)

( Each Service also has this option individually, in General settings of the Service, which overrides the one from Amelia "global settings")

And, if you don't know that far ahead exactly when she will have the 7 day Retreat Events.

Let's say if she knows when the Event will be only one month ahead of time,

and a customer comes to book a regular Yoga appointment 6 months from now.

This appointment is now already set - so if you go in to add an Event that will happen 6 months from now,

Amelia will let you create that Event at the same time when that Appointment is due.

( Of course, you can always re-schedule or cancel any appointments if needed, and set up a Notification for Customers so they can see if it is rescheduled, or cancelled, etc)

As we noted in the previous reply :

if some appointment has already been booked and you scheduled the event after the appointment is already set, 

the event and appointment will be at the same time, so pay attention to this.

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So if you can plan ahead with the Events, and only allow customers to book the regular Service ahead for a limited time, this will give you enough time in advance to set up these Retreat Events,

which will make the Service unavailable in those times.

Let me know if that can work - basically it depends how far ahead you will be able to set up the Event times?

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Let me know if that helps.

Hi, Esther.

Sorry, i forgot to add the part about the first point regarding viewing all this in a Calendar.

You wrote :

The client would like to have her regular yoga classes (services) also displayed in the calendar overview.

If you mean the Calendar on the Amelia's back-end where the Appointments are?

That is not possible currently.  We have separated this Calendar only for Appointments from Services,

and the Events have the separate Tab, where you can only see the Events.

You can also set up a front-end Employee Paneland see if that might look better.

It also has two separate Tabs, and the employee has to switch the tabs between Appointments and Events.

At the moment, that is everything we have - there is no way to somehow 'merge' or bring together the Appointments and Events on same View, so to speak.

If you wish to see something like that in the future, please make a development suggestion and our devs will do their best to work on it, but i can't promise an ETA.

Please feel free to search through our feature suggestion page, 

 to see if someone may be already suggested this feature. If you can't see it, feel free to add your suggestion there, and as more people vote, the feature will move higher on the priority list.

You can certainly follow our changeLog page if you'd like, where we state any changes/new features/bug fixes during updates;

and our newsletter, so you're informed about new features, bug fixes, freebies, etc.

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When it comes to trying additional plugins to achieve something like that, to get appointments and Events to appear together in one Schedule, it is not possible to achieve it in any way.

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The only workaround to have appointments and Events visually appear somewhere can be if you connect the Employee to their Outlook Calendar - Then she will see everything in the Outlook Calendar.

Here is my example, i just connect this Employee to his Outlook Calendar,

and book a few appointments along with creating the Event that lasts 10 days,

and here is how it will look in Outlook :

I highlighted the regular Yoga appointments in red color, and left the 10 day Event beneath.

Let me know if that might help as a solution?

( Just to note - it is not possible to synchronize the Events with Google Calendar, it is only possible with Outlook Calendar at the moment, so i picked it for this example)

Thank you.

Hi, Esther.

I see what you mean, unfortunately it is not possible for back-end or front-end to make one View that would show a Calendar with available time slots for scheduling appointments of Services,

and to show multi-day Events together.

The Events are completely separated from Services.

Some of the main differences, and the most important one for this use-case is that for Services it is not possible for one appointment to last over 24 hours, so customers can't book the 7 day Retreat this way;

but the positive side of Services is that a customer can pick a time slot from the available employee's working hours that you set up.

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The Events can go multiple days - so if a customer buys a ticket for this Event, they get 7 days included,

but for the Events the Admin/Manager or Employee ( person who creates the Event) sets fixed dates/times and duration,

a customer can not choose his own date and time, such as they can for appointments.

So they can only see all available Events from the Event Calendar View on front-end, or Event List View on front-end, and pick from the available Events to buy a ticket.

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Services and Events have a completely different logic in the back-end code, and they also have a different Calendar.

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2. The Sports Demo page that shows all the available Yoga bookings from this page,

https://sports.wpamelia.com/yoga/

these are only Services, and it is used with shortcode for the Catalog Booking Form.

If you want to try that, you can make several Services and place them in one Category, then use this shortcode :

[ameliacatalog category=5]

In our back-end of this Sports Demo, we placed all Yoga services under Category ID 5, so we pass ID 5 in that Shortcode of the page.

You can also check out our new Catalog 2.0 Booking View, more details here.

https://wpamelia.com/catalog-booking-form-2-0/

So, basically this is for a group of Services under a Category,

and the other Page you sent, is an Events List View, it shows only Events.

Yes, for the time being it is not possible in any way to somehow merge Services and Events both on the same Calendar in the front-end.

You can add a feature development suggestion, but i can't say a realistic ETA if or when something like that might be possible, our developers will certainly do their best to try and make a solution as soon as possible.

On the Front-end, for the moment you can only place both on same Page, like you can set up a description for the regular service, with an image etc, and set up a button that says "Book this here", or anything else as the button text,  and that can lead customers either to a separate page for booking the regular service,

or you can try to wrap this in Elementor Pop Up on Button ( Here is our Guide how to do that).Using Amelia in Elementor Popup

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And somewhere on the same Page you can set up to present the 7 day Retreat Event, but customers will have to book them separately like that.

Hi, Esther.

No problem, i am happy to advise.

Thank you for the kind words.

Those are the current possibilities in terms of combining appointment bookings with Event bookings.

I hope you'll be able to combine them in a way that will be acceptable for the client's desired use-case,

there can be multiple ways, as you can see, such as both on the same page,

the service booking can go through a pop up as well, etc.

You can check out the guides from our documentation, on some of them we have YouTube Video examples as well, so that might help.

Please don't hesitate to create new tickets for anything else we could assist with.

Have a great day!