Connecting Google Calendar so you never double-book

If your room is already booked through some other channel, Soundbooked has no way of knowing unless you tell it. Calendar sync is how you tell it, without having to remember to.

It runs both directions

Into Soundbooked: busy events in the connected Google calendar become blocked time on your room. Guests cannot book over them, and the room stops turning up in date searches for those slots.

Out of Soundbooked: confirmed sessions appear in your Google calendar as events prefixed with your studio's name, so the calendar you already live in shows your platform bookings alongside everything else.

Connect it per room, not per studio

Each room connects to its own calendar. That sounds like extra work and it is the whole point: two rooms sharing one calendar would block each other for no reason. If you run three rooms, make three calendars.

Only the studio owner can connect, disconnect, or change a room's calendar. Team members cannot, and that is deliberate: the connection carries access to a personal Google account.

What to expect on timing

Imports run on a schedule, roughly every half hour, over a rolling window from the current month to about three months ahead. So an event you add to Google is not blocked on Soundbooked the same second. If you have just blocked out something imminent, use Sync now rather than hoping.

Exports are immediate. A session confirms, the event appears.

An event outside the rolling window is not imported at all. A commitment eight months out needs blocking on Soundbooked directly.

The one conflict you will see

Bookings cannot be made over blocked time, and blocked time cannot be added over bookings. There is exactly one way the two can collide: you book the room out somewhere else, that external event syncs in, and it lands on top of a Soundbooked session that was already confirmed.

When that happens both stay visible and you resolve it. You get a banner on your calendar and a daily email until it is sorted. The platform will not silently cancel someone's session to make its own data tidy, which means the resolution is a real decision only you can make: honour the Soundbooked booking, or cancel it.

Worth knowing before you make that call: if you cancel a confirmed session, the guest is refunded in full regardless of your cancellation policy. The policy protects you from a guest cancelling, never the other way round. Double-booking yourself is expensive.

Disconnecting

Disconnecting a room stops both directions and removes the imported blocks. Your own calendar keeps the events that were already exported into it. If you are switching a room to a different calendar, expect the first import to take a moment to catch up, and check the month view afterwards rather than assuming.