Google Calendar’s booking page or GeoCalendar, for visits you drive to

The difference in one sentence

Both let a customer pick a time that lands on your Google Calendar. An appointment schedule offers the times you are free, with a gap between appointments if you set one. GeoCalendar asks where the customer is, and offers the free times that add the least driving to the day already on that calendar.

Feature by feature

Where appointment schedules are the better tool

They are already there. Google’s own description is a booking page set up directly in Calendar, with no other apps, extensions or downloads, and a personal Google account gets one booking page at no charge. For someone who takes calls, or sees clients in one place, there is nothing to add and nothing to learn.

On eligible paid Google plans they also take payment through Stripe, send up to five reminder emails, check several calendars and verify the email address of people who book. GeoCalendar takes no payments.

Where GeoCalendar is the better tool

An appointment schedule has a buffer time: a fixed gap between appointments. It has a maximum number of bookings a day and a minimum notice. Google’s help pages describe nothing that looks at where an appointment is. So a customer on the far side of town is offered the same times as one around the corner from your last job. How to add travel time in Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple Calendar covers what the calendar itself can do.

GeoCalendar reads the same Google Calendar and starts from the address. For each open time it finds the visit before and the visit after, estimates the drive in and the drive out, and subtracts the drive you would have made anyway. The times that add the least are offered first, and every other open time stays available.

• A service area turns away addresses you would never drive to, before they book.
• The drive is blocked on your calendar with the visit, so the next booking accounts for it.
• With several hosts, each person’s own calendar is checked and each time is offered for whoever is nearest. Google notes that an appointment schedule does not check a co-host’s availability by default.

The limits: drive times are typical-traffic estimates and not live traffic, and the customer can still choose a time that was not suggested.

Using both

There is nothing to move. GeoCalendar connects to the Google Calendar you already use, so you can keep an appointment schedule for calls and send customers GeoCalendar’s link for visits. Each booking lands on the same calendar and blocks that time for the other. Visits already on the calendar count toward the ranking as long as each has an address in its location field.