topic Re: Reserving tour guides (Round Robin "light" workaround) in Sales Hub Tools

Reserving tour guides (Round Robin "light" workaround)

NKempe — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 18:58:10 GMT

I am trying to configure the assignment of tour guides at a school. Presently we have a bunch of standing slots blocked out in the Admissions calendar so we know which guides are available each day (non-Hubspot users). The clients do not receive the calendar invites but rather the tour guides. Is there a way to link the preexisting events to a Hubspot contact from Google calendar?

Or inversely see who's available from Hubspot and link the to Google calendar from Hubspot? I would assume this would require configuring some kind of availability within Hubspot.

I do not believe that Round Robin is what I am looking for and either way, I only have the Starter version. Any workarounds that point me in the right direction would be most appreciated.

Re: Reserving tour guides (Round Robin "light" workaround)

karstenkoehler — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 06:36:02 GMT

Hi @NKempe,

Availability of meeting participants cannot be configured in HubSpot. HubSpot can only check the associated calendars of users. If a calendar is free at a certain time for a specific user, that slot will be shown as available in the meeting link.

That means that any availability would have to be managed outside of HubSpot.

Could you explain again who is booking whom in your case and how availability is managed currently?

If you want tour participants (or team managers) to be able to book a certain tour with the guides who are currently available, then all guides would have to have their own HubSpot user account, their own connected calendar (where they manage their own availability) and an assigned Sales hub seat.

Best regards!

Re: Reserving tour guides (Round Robin "light" workaround)

NKempe — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 18:06:01 GMT

Thanks Karsten, the prospective clients do not receive the calendar invites themselves nor do they self book. The guides are booked by our Admissions/Reception person whilst on the phone with the clients.

The Admissions person has a paid seat, but the tour guides do not.

If I understood your comment correctly - I need set up all the tour guides as Hubspot users (even if they will never use the platform actively), configure their availability in Hubspot and integrate their Google calendars. I think if I tweak their working hours in Google to end before the end of day tours begin on the days that they are not available I might be able to use this for my specific situation.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll have a fiddle around and see if I can get it to work.

Thanks,

Nick

Re: Reserving tour guides (Round Robin "light" workaround)

NKempe — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 12:38:09 GMT

I've accepted as solution, without being able to confirm anything you said. Unfortunately, I have the starter version so I only have two paid seats. Our tours guide will literally have no interaction with platform directly, so it does not make sense to set them up as paid sets just so that HubSpot will look at their availability correctly. Meanwhile I'll keep looking for a workaround outside of Hubspot. Thank you for your time.

Re: Reserving tour guides (Round Robin "light" workaround)

kepan — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 01:40:13 GMT

You're right — HubSpot Meetings can only check availability for users who have connected calendars, so there's no native way to manage scheduling for people who don't have HubSpot seats.

Given your setup where reception books tours over the phone while the guides don't actually use HubSpot, the simplest approach is probably to handle it on the Google Calendar side. You could create a calendar for each guide (or a resource calendar per guide) and share them all with the receptionist. When a call comes in, they just check which guide is free and book directly on that person's calendar. Dropping the prospect's email or a link to their HubSpot record into the event description makes it easy to trace later.

If you eventually want prospects to self-book online, something like Calendly or SavvyCal can do round-robin assignment across multiple Google calendars and sync bookings back to HubSpot.

Quick question though — do your guides already have their own Google calendars, or is everyone working off a shared one with blocked time slots?