Can customers choose Teams, phone or in person in Bookings?

Where these settings live#

Every shared booking page defines them on the service itself: Services → pick a service → Basic details.

• Location is free text. It's printed in the confirmation and reminder emails and on the calendar event. It's not a menu the customer chooses from.
• Add online meeting turns a unique Teams (or Skype) link on or off for every appointment of that service. Nothing on the booking page lets the customer turn it off.
• Duration is how long every booking of that service lasts. There's one value per service.

The Q&A thread about choosing Phone, Teams or In-Person has more than 40 "same question" votes. Some answers there point to an "Advanced options → Allow customers to choose a location" setting. The person who asked replied that they couldn't see any Advanced option. That setting isn't in Microsoft's service documentation, so don't build a process around it. The duration thread (23 votes) has an accepted answer saying it's not possible and recommending one service per duration.

The workaround: one service per option#

Say you offer a 30-minute consultation over Teams, by phone or in person. Build three services:

1. Go to Services → Add new service.
2. Name it so the list reads as a choice, for example "Consultation – Microsoft Teams". Turn Add online meeting on and set Location to "Microsoft Teams".
3. Add "Consultation – Phone call". Turn Add online meeting off and set Location to something like "We'll call the number you give us". Then open Custom fields and tick Required next to the phone number so you always get one.
4. Add "Consultation – In person". Leave the online meeting off and put your address in Location.
5. On Assign staff, give all three services the same people.
6. Save each service, then Save and publish on the Booking page if the page isn't live yet.

For different lengths, do the same with names like "Consultation – 30 min" and "Consultation – 60 min". If you need both mode and length, the number of services multiplies quickly. Microsoft says the number of services "should be limited to 50", so combine sensibly. For example, you could offer only the combinations you actually sell.

Details that make it work better#

• Staff can't be double-booked across the variants. Services set to Bookable when staff are free check the staff member's calendar. A Teams booking at 10:00 blocks the same person's phone slot at 10:00.
• Use the description. Each service's Description appears behind the information icon on the booking page. Use it to explain what the customer gets with each option.
• Share one variant directly. Each service has its own URL. If a campaign is only for in-person visits, send people straight to that service. See linking directly to one service.
• Check Teams licences. Online meetings need a Teams-enabled licence for the staff member who is booked. If links go missing, see why the Teams link is missing.

Why not ask with a custom question?#

You could add a custom field such as "How would you like to meet?" with the answers Teams, phone and in person. The problem is that the question doesn't change anything Bookings does. If Add online meeting is on, every booking gets a Teams link. If it's off, none do. The location in the email and on the calendar event stays the same whatever the customer answers. That can work for small teams who follow up by hand, but separate services keep the confirmation email, the calendar event and the meeting link in step with what the customer chose. For more on custom fields, see custom and required questions.

If you're setting up a page from scratch, the shared booking page setup guide covers how to structure services before you publish.