Integrating Redtail and Calendly for shared conference room scheduling

Hello... This is doable but requires a bit of logic. The approach would be to use Zapier to watch for new appointments in Redtail, then based on whether it's an in-office booking, trigger a Calendly block on the shared conference room event type only, leaving the Zoom/phone event types untouched. The tricky part is Calendly's API doesn't natively support blocking specific event types dynamically, so you'd likely need to use Calendly's scheduling rules or a workaround via their API to manage availability on the shared room link specifically.

Hi ​@carterg 

Perhaps consider using Acuity instead of Calendly.

Acuity has “Resources” for this specific purpose.

Help with Acuity Resources: https://help.acuityscheduling.com/hc/en-us/articles/16676949567757-Using-resources-to-limit-bookings

Resources are additional scheduling restrictions on top of your existing availability and scheduling limits. They can be used to limit the number of appointments happening at one time across multiple calendars.

Hey ​@carterg,

You can probably achieve this by creating a Conference Room sub calendar. 

One zap could be for Redtails to block the in person events in the sub calendar. The exact Zap will depend on the calendar provider you are using. Depending on your exact setup then you can check the availability for in office against this shared calendar and for the online against their personal calendar.

Hope it helps!

PS: If you need more active help, I’m happy to connect through my Zapier Solution Partner page if you’d like to reach out here- https://zapier.com/partnerdirectory/automation-jinn

Hi ​@carterg 

Here are two clean approaches to solve this:

1. Shared Calendar Workaround (Stay with Calendly): Docs Link

Create a dedicated Google Calendar for the conference room. Use Zapier to sync in-office Redtail appointments to that calendar, then add it as a secondary calendar check in each advisor's Calendly event types. Virtual meetings won't check it, so they remain available. This uses Calendly's native ability to check multiple calendars for conflicts. 

2. Acuity's Resource Feature (Switch Platforms) : Docs Link

Acuity Scheduling has a built-in "Resources" feature specifically for shared rooms and equipment. Create the conference room as a resource, assign it only to in-office appointment types, and the platform automatically prevents double-booking across advisors—no Zapier needed.

If you're still running into issues, drop a screenshot of the error and a quick description of what your Zap is doing, happy to take a look!

And if you'd rather just get it sorted quickly, I offer a free 20-min Zapier troubleshooting call. Book it under Resources on my Zapier Directory profile: https://zapier.com/partnerdirectory/automatemybiz

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Hi there ​@carterg 👋 Have you had a chance to try any of the suggestions shared here yet?

Let us know what worked, or if you need any more help 🙂

Hi Sam,

I appreciate all of the responses, but I have not found any success yet. I am really struggling to find the right solution because I continue finding problems. We want this process to be automated, not manual. I understand if it must be manual going forward, but it seems like with the amount of automation Zapier has, this can be done. 

To reply to the messages in here with problems I’ve discovered:

1. We are already invested in Calendly and would like to continue with it. 
2. Calendly can only add events to ONE Outlook calendar. If Advisor A’s in office events go to his personal outlook calendar (where Calendly syncs them), the conference room calendar will never see them. This suggestion assumes I can route the same event type to multiple calendars, which isn’t true. In addition, specific event types cannot be applied to certain calendars.  
3. We use outlook exclusively so cannot use google calendar. 

I’m still searching for answers/help on this further. I’ve been working with Copilot on this, and it suggests custom booking form via Zapier. Would that be worth pursuing? I would really like to stay on calendly. We’re considering abandoning redtail as a whole and just using Outlook/Calendly, but I’m still not sure if that solves our issue. Please let me know if you have any feedback/suggestions.

Thanks,

Carter 

Happy to lend a hand with this ​@carterg!

As you say, I don’t think getting rid of Redtail would solve things, since the issue seems to be more about ensuring Calendly can see when the conference room is already booked.

If you want to stick with Calendly then perhaps you could treat the conference room itself as a separate “user” in Calendly. Doing that would allow you to use the Collective event type and when an event is created you’d include both the email address for the conference room user account and the Advisor’s email, which should get the event added to both the Advisor calendar and the conference room calendar. Calendly have a guide that explains that approach here: How to schedule with conference rooms 

Do you think that sort of approach could work?