Appointment chains
An appointment chain is a single booking action that reserves two or more appointments back-to-back. Useful when the customer’s intended experience is multi-step: a trial class followed by a consultation, or in medical contexts, an exam followed by a doctor’s review.
Chains are advanced — most orgs never use them — but when the use case fits, they save the customer from having to coordinate two bookings manually.
When to use a chain
Section titled “When to use a chain”The right time to use a chain is when two appointments are bound together in the customer’s experience and the second one can’t be scheduled independently:
- “Probetraining + Beratungsgespräch” — the consultation makes no sense without the prior trial.
- “Untersuchung 1 + Untersuchung 2 + Arztgespräch” — sequential medical workflow.
If the second appointment is optional or can be scheduled later, don’t use a chain — book the first, follow up via an automation, and let the customer pick a separate time for the second.
How chains work
Section titled “How chains work”A chain is defined as an ordered list of appointment types with constraints between consecutive steps:
| Constraint | Example value |
|---|---|
| Minimum gap | 0 minutes (back-to-back) |
| Maximum gap | 15 minutes (must be within 15 min of the prior appointment ending) |
The search engine:
- Searches for free slots of the first appointment type.
- For each candidate, searches for free slots of the second appointment type that fall within the configured gap.
- Continues for each subsequent step.
- Returns the chains where every step has a viable slot.
Only chains where every step is satisfiable are offered. A “partial” chain is never returned.
Limiting resources
Section titled “Limiting resources”The most useful chain configuration limits each step to a specific resource (or resource group). Example: “Probetraining can run on any Coach, but the consultation must run on a specific consultation specialist.”
You set this on the chain definition — each step has its own resource filter.
When the limiting resource is the same for both steps (e.g. the same coach must do both), set the resource filter to that resource on both steps. The engine treats the coach’s schedule as one continuous availability and looks for a contiguous free window large enough for both appointments + the gap.
Booking a chain
Section titled “Booking a chain”In the console, the booking UI offers chain types as a separate booking flow. Pick the chain, the search engine runs as above, and bookable chain options are presented as paired time blocks.
A chain booking creates multiple appointment records, one per step. Each appointment has its own ID, its own confirmation email (if configured), and can be rescheduled or cancelled independently — but the system tracks the chain relationship for reporting.
Reporting and analytics
Section titled “Reporting and analytics”Chain bookings count once as a chain conversion, plus once for each constituent appointment. This matters for funnel analytics: don’t double-count chain conversions by summing per-appointment metrics. Use the chain-level metrics for total demand.
Limitations
Section titled “Limitations”- A chain can have at most ~5 steps before the search becomes slow enough to time out on busy schedules.
- Chains can’t currently span calendars — every step must be on the same Standort/Calendar.
- Cancelling a single step doesn’t automatically cancel later steps. Decide your policy and communicate it to the customer.
What’s next
Section titled “What’s next”You’re done with Scheduling. Move on to Automations to wire up the in-between (confirmation emails, reminders, no-show flows).