With the Guest Booking feature, resources such as desks and parking spots can quickly be booked for external guests, ensuring they have a dedicated space to work in your office and giving you and your employees a clear view of who is coming there.
1. How do I book for a guest?
Navigate to our web app and go to the Book area. You are now given the option to book a desk or a parking spot for an external guest. Select the resource > Guest > Enter their full name and email address, and voilà ! Your guest has a secured place at your office.
Guests are informed via email that a resource (a desk or a parking spot) has been booked for them. The email contains the details of their booked resources for the day, i.e., time, date, desk/parking spot number, and room. Booking owners will also receive an email with the same booking info.
If check-in is active within the company, the booking owner must check in for their guest from the Schedule or Book sections, as the guest does not have access to deskbird.
💡 The guest booking also appears in the Upcoming bookings of the booking owner. This quick overview makes checking in, editing, or removing the guest booking a breeze.
💡 Booking a desk or parking spot for external guests will be available separately in the meeting room booking flow later this year.
2. Who can see if a guest is coming to the office?
When navigating to the web app, admins have real-time visibility into the internal and external guests currently in the office, including details about the bookings. Users can always know if and when external employees are in the office and/or in the same room. Access to this information empowers employees to make informed decisions, such as booking a desk nearby, especially when dealing with sensitive information, or engaging in specific discussions with external guests.
In the Schedule section, too, all employees can see if any guests are coming on that specific day. When they click on the number of guest(s), they can see a list of who is coming to the office:
3. What does the system consider an external guest?
A guest is someone with an email address that has a different domain than your company's. For example, if your company uses the domain @deskbird.com, a guest must have an email address with a domain that is not @deskbird.com:
4. Who can book for an external guest?
Admins can decide which user roles (managers, group managers or standard users) can book for external guests in the Booking settings:
💡 If you allow internal employees to be able to book for external guests, they will also need to check in for their guests.
5. Privacy settings
Detailed guest information is accessible based on access permissions. If you have created a booking for a guest, you will see it in your bookings as displayed in (1). Admins, office admins, and managers will always be able to see all guest bookings in the respective office (managers, office admins) or all offices (admins).
Booking owners can choose to remain anonymous when booking resources for guests, whereas external guests’ bookings are always clearly marked to allow internal employees to be easily aware of who is coming to the office or the area where they have also booked a desk.
If a guest booking was made anonymously, users would still be able to see that this is an external person and not internal, to ensure privacy concerns about compliance.
The privacy settings established for the company also extend to external guests. If a user lacks access to a colleague's profile or bookings due to company privacy settings, they won't have visibility into the details of external guest bookings made by that colleague.
6. Can I select a status for my guest without booking a desk or a parking spot?
Currently, the feature supports booking for guests rather than scheduling on their behalf. In other words, you are required to book a desk or parking spot for them.
However, if you don't need or can't book any specific resources for them, you can use this workaround:
- Open the deskbird web app > Go to the Admin Portal > Click on Floors and spaces.
- Create a new area, perhaps under Other. You could name it "Visitors."
- Incorporate the desk(s) or parking spot(s) intended for external guests and book one for them.
While they may not physically utilize these resources, booking one of them ensures that external guests have an "Office" status while keeping the actual desks available for the employees.
- This ensures the visibility of visitors in the daily office overview and the bookings tab.