Location groups allow you to organize your locations into groupings that behave like territories. They let you basically create 'folders' for your locations so that you can direct clients to the scheduler that contains the locations nearest or most convenient for them.
This is great if you have a whole lot of locations where you offer appointments - maybe you service multiple states. You could group all of your locations in 1 state within a single group and then provide that group's private URL to a group of your clients so that they could book a proper appointment with ease.
For this example let's say we run a fitness studio with facilities across the southeastern United States - 2 in Florida, 3 in Georgia and 2 in North Carolina. We wouldn't want to display all those locations in 1 long list! Instead, we could create a group called "Florida", a group called "Georgia" and a group called "North Carolina", and then sort the respective locations into these groups.
In this documentation, we'll cover -
- How to Create a Location Group
- How to Edit a Location Group
- How to Send Clients to Book at a Location Group
If you have questions after reading through this documentation, reach out to our support team and we'd be happy to answer them!
How to Create a Location Group
Let's say we run a fitness studio as described above and we have several different locations where we take appointments. To make it easier for our clients to book an appointment, let's add in some location groups so you can direct clients to the scheduler that's most convenient for them. That way they'll only see the locations closest to where they're located.
To do this, you'll need to go to Settings > Locations and click on the Add New Location Group tab -
This will take me to the Location Super Group Profile page where I'll see the following fields -
- Location Group Name - This displays the name of the location group that clients will see.
- Internal Display Name - This displays the name of the location group that staff will see.
- Location Group Description - This appears under the location group name on the Client Scheduler.
- Private Location Group - This determines if this location group will be visible on the public scheduler or just on any private booking site and the Backoffice.
- Location Group Timezone - Set the timezone of the location group here. This must be set to successfully create a location group.
- Locations to include - Check the boxes next to any locations that will be included in this location group.
Once you have set all of the fields of this location group, you'll need to click on the green Save button on the upper right to add this new location group. Finally, you'll need to change the Panel Flow found under the Settings > Scheduler Rules & Logic or the custom booking site that contains the location groups so that it includes a Location Group panel -
Now when clients visit any of my location super group booking sites, they will see the Location Groups panel directly after the Welcome panel -
Then based on the location group they select the locations within that location group will be displayed -
How to Edit a Location Group
Once you've created a location group you may decide to change the name of the group or another detail at a later time. To do so, you'll first need to navigate to Settings > Locations > Location Groups and click on the View button next to the Florida group -
This will take you to the Location Group Profile where you can view the Location Group Name, a few text fields that I can use to populate my emails and the custom booking site. To edit this profile page, you'll need to click on the blue Edit button on the upper right of the profile -
You can see that this location group profile consists of 2 sections that can be accessed from the upper left menu, Overview and Locations -
You can also view the contents of the Locations tab by scrolling down to the bottom of the page, and can add more locations to the group by clicking on the blue Edit button.
To view that URL you'll need to go to Settings > Locations > Location Groups and you will see the Private URL next to the location group -
Before you can email a location group link to your clients we recommend creating an invitation template (you can read the step-by-step guide here in our documentation). You'll need to add the private URL to the invitation template, and then you can send them out to your clients!
The one field on the location group profile I want to point out is the Custom Booking Site. Once you have clicked on the Edit button on the profile page, you can scroll down until you see it. You'll need to click on the Create Custom Booking Site button -
And you'll get taken to the Add New Booking Site page where you can give the booking site an Internal Name, a custom Webhandle and choose whether or not to Publish Booking Site -
When you create a new location group the group is automatically given a private URL that will function the same as a custom booking site, I just wanted to show you how you could customize the site a bit more!