Making appointments on bookings show as free on outlook and teams calendars

Bookings and Outlook/Teams availability are driven by the “Show as” status of the calendar event. Bookings itself does not provide a per-service setting to force appointments to appear as Free on staff calendars; instead, the free/busy state comes from the staff members’ Microsoft 365 calendars.

To keep outreach clinic appointments visible but not block availability for other meetings, the events created on staff calendars must be set to Free instead of Busy:

1. After a Bookings appointment is created and appears on the assigned staff member’s Outlook calendar, open that calendar item in Outlook.
2. Change its status from Busy (or Out of Office, etc.) to Free:
   • In Outlook on the web or new Outlook: right-click the event in the calendar, choose Show As, then select Free.
   • In classic Outlook: open the event and use the Show As or Options dropdown to select Free.
3. Once set to Free, that time will no longer block free/busy availability in Outlook or Teams, but the appointment will still be visible on the calendar.

Notes:

• By default, normal time‑bounded meetings are created as Busy, so this change must be made explicitly on the calendar item.
• All‑day events default to Free; if any outreach days are modeled as all‑day events, they will not block availability unless changed to Busy.

There is no tenant‑wide or Bookings‑level setting in the provided information that automatically creates Bookings appointments as Free for all staff, so the supported method is to adjust the “Show as” status on the resulting calendar items.

References:

• Add your out of office event to the Outlook calendar of others
• Microsoft Bookings
• Add team members to Bookings
• Bookings with me calendar doesn’t honor user’s personal calendars
• Configure service availability in Microsoft Bookings