How Hours Affect AI Booking Availability

Your operating hours do more than tell the AI when to greet callers as "open" — they directly shape which booking times are offered and accepted during calls and online.

The connection between hours and bookings

When a customer calls or visits your booking page and asks to make a booking, Speako checks your configured availability to determine which time slots to offer. That availability is built from several inputs:

  • Your weekly operating hours — the recurring schedule for each day of the week.
  • Date-specific overrides — one-off changes that replace the weekly schedule for specific dates.
  • Holiday closures — days marked as closed that override the weekly schedule.
  • Staff availability (service businesses) — individual team members' hours, which must overlap with location hours for a slot to be bookable.
  • Existing bookings — already-booked slots are removed from available options.

Open hours set the outer boundary

Your operating hours define the earliest and latest times a booking can be placed. No slot will be offered to customers that falls outside your open hours, even if no bookings yet exist.

For example, if your operating hours are 9 am – 5 pm, a caller asking for an 8 am appointment will be told that time isn't available.

Closed days and holidays are fully excluded

Any day marked as closed — whether through a closed-day override, a holiday closure, or by having no operating hours set for that day of the week — will show as unavailable. Customers cannot book on those days.

After-hours booking

By default, the AI will not accept new bookings for times that fall outside your operating hours. However, your AI configuration may include an option to allow the AI to take bookings even when the business is currently closed (e.g. a caller rings at 8 pm to book for tomorrow).

This setting controls whether the AI books outside current hours — not whether it offers slots outside your operating window. Even with after-hours booking enabled, slots offered to customers must still fall within your defined open hours.

Changes to hours update availability

When you change your operating hours, Speako recalculates availability for affected dates. This means:

  • Adding hours on a previously closed day makes new slots available.
  • Reducing hours removes slots that no longer fall within the open window.
  • Closing a date removes all availability for that date.

⚠️ Important: If you reduce your hours after bookings have already been made, existing bookings that now fall outside the new hours will not be automatically cancelled. Review upcoming bookings whenever you make significant changes to hours.

Keeping hours accurate

Accurate hours are essential for the AI to work well. Gaps or errors in your schedule can cause the AI to turn away customers during times you're actually open, or to offer slots you can't honour. Review your hours periodically — especially before busy periods like holidays.

💡 Tip: For temporarily reduced trading (e.g. over a long weekend or school holidays), use date-specific overrides rather than changing your weekly schedule. That way, your standard hours automatically resume when the override period ends.