How Available Times Are Worked Out
From your availability windows to the times a visitor actually sees — and the two settings that behave differently than they read.
What It Is
Four settings on a booking schedule decide what a visitor is offered: Slot Duration, Slot Gap, Max Daily Slots and Days Ahead to Show. Your availability windows provide the raw material; these four shape it.
The result is not a fixed timetable. It is worked out fresh each time someone opens the page, against the state of your calendar at that moment.
How It Works
Step one: candidate slots. For each day inside the window, Zyntro looks up that weekday's availability. Starting at the beginning of each window it creates a candidate meeting of Slot Duration minutes, then moves forward by Slot Gap minutes and tries again, until a candidate would run past the end of the window — that one is discarded rather than trimmed.
So the gap is the step between start times, not time set aside after a meeting. With a 60-minute duration and a 30-minute gap, the candidates overlap each other: 09:00, 09:30, 10:00. Only one of them can ever be booked, because booking one removes the others.
Step two: remove what is not really free. Every candidate is checked against the calendar. Anything already booked or blocked removes the candidates it overlaps. Anything already in the past is dropped. On a group calendar a candidate survives if at least one eligible member is free for it.
Step three: apply the daily cap. If Max Daily Slots is set, Zyntro offers that many of each day's free times and keeps the remainder in reserve rather than discarding them. Those reserves are what an AI agent can draw on to suggest an alternative if someone on a call turns the first offer down.
Step four: convert. The surviving times, which were worked out in the calendar's timezone, are converted into the visitor's own before being shown.
Why It Matters
Because Slot Gap is the setting people get wrong. Reading it as the gap between meetings produces back-to-back bookings with no recovery time. If you want fifteen minutes after every 45-minute call, the duration is 45 and the gap is 60 — the gap has to cover the meeting and the breathing room.
Because the daily cap makes the page non-deterministic. With a cap set, the times offered are a selection from what is free, so a visitor who looks twice may see different times, and two visitors may be offered different times. That spreads bookings across the day instead of packing the morning, but it does surprise people who expect a timetable.
Because there is no minimum notice. A slot is offered until the moment it starts. If you do not want someone booking you for ten minutes from now, there is currently no setting for that — the practical approach is to keep the next part of your day blocked out as events.
Because the calendar is the authority. Everything on it removes availability. That is what makes a booking page trustworthy, and it is also why a calendar that is not kept current starts offering times you cannot honour.
Examples
60-minute meetings, 60-minute gap, 09:00 to 12:00
Offers 09:00, 10:00 and 11:00. Clean hourly slots, no overlap, nothing wasted — the straightforward setup and a good default.
60-minute meetings, 30-minute gap, same window
Offers 09:00, 09:30, 10:00, 10:30 and 11:00. More choice for the visitor, and whichever they take removes the overlapping ones. Good for filling a day efficiently; it does mean a booking at 09:30 leaves 09:00 to 09:30 unusable.
45-minute meetings with 15 minutes of recovery
Duration 45, gap 60. Starts land on the hour and each meeting ends at quarter to, leaving you fifteen minutes. The gap being larger than the duration is what creates the breathing room.
A wide window but only four meetings a day
Keep 09:00 to 17:00 as availability and set the daily cap to 4. The visitor sees four times spread across the day rather than every slot in it, and the rest of your day stays yours without you blocking it by hand.
Days ahead set to 60, nothing showing beyond next week
The window is how far Zyntro will look, not a promise of availability. If the weeks beyond are full, or those weekdays have no availability window, there is nothing to offer however far ahead you look.
Duration and gap together
| Duration + gap | Start times in a 09:00–12:00 window | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 30 + 30 | 09:00, 09:30, 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, 11:30 | Back-to-back half hours, no recovery time |
| 60 + 60 | 09:00, 10:00, 11:00 | Clean hourly meetings |
| 60 + 30 | 09:00, 09:30, 10:00, 10:30, 11:00 | Overlapping choices; one booking removes its neighbours |
| 45 + 60 | 09:00, 10:00, 11:00 | 15 minutes free after every meeting |
| 30 + 60 | 09:00, 10:00, 11:00 | Half-hour meetings an hour apart — deliberately sparse |
Tip: If you want recovery time between meetings, make the gap longer than the duration. The difference between the two is the breathing room you get. Equal values mean back-to-back; a gap smaller than the duration means overlapping offers.
