What's the Difference Between Blocking Time and Deleting Availability?

These two actions look similar on the surface — both result in a customer not being able to book a particular slot — but they work differently and are meant for different situations.

Blocking time

Blocking time creates a temporary hold over specific dates or hours without touching your underlying schedule configuration. Your regular working hours, staff assignments, and booking rules stay exactly as they are — you're just layering a "not available right now" period on top, for things like a vacation, a one-off appointment outside the calendar system, or maintenance on a rental unit.

Blocked time is meant to be temporary and specific. It's easy to remove once the reason for it has passed, and it doesn't require reconfiguring anything else about the calendar.

Deleting availability

Deleting or changing availability means editing the actual underlying rule — removing a working day, shortening working hours, or unassigning a staff member from a service entirely. This is a structural change to how the calendar behaves going forward, not a temporary hold.

Which one to use

• Use blocking time for anything temporary or one-off: a day off, a maintenance window, a personal appointment.
• Use deleting or editing availability for a permanent or long-term change: a staff member's hours permanently changing, a service no longer being offered on certain days, or a calendar's core schedule shifting.

Good to know: If you find yourself blocking the same recurring time slot every single week, that's usually a sign it should be a permanent availability change instead — recurring manual blocks are easy to forget and easy to get out of sync with reality.