Multi-Location Offices: Time Zones, Holidays, Languages

Imagine Katarzyna, the workplace manager of a software company with three offices: headquarters in Kraków, a 40-person team in Lisbon and a small sales office in New York. For a while all three shared one booking spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet quietly assumed that everyone lived in Kraków.

The cracks showed on ordinary days. The Lisbon team's standing Thursday bookings kept running straight through 10 June, a public holiday in Portugal, so the desks looked busy on a day the office was empty. A New York colleague read "check in by 10:00" and wondered whose 10:00. The Polish holidays on 3 May and 11 November were blocked for everyone, including the two offices that were open. And the welcome e-mails went out in Polish to people who did not speak it.

None of this is dramatic, but every small mismatch teaches people that the booking system does not quite describe their office — and then they stop trusting it. This article walks through how Desk & Park models several locations so that each one behaves like the office it actually is.

Each location is its own place, with its own clock

In Desk & Park a location is an office site: a name, an address, and three settings that matter more than they look.

• A time zone. Every location has an IANA time zone such as Europe/Warsaw, Europe/Lisbon or America/New_York, and it is required — the system never quietly assumes the headquarters' zone for a new site. Everything that depends on "today" or "10:00" at that location — check-in windows, deadlines, the day shown on the map — is resolved in its own zone, daylight-saving changes included.
• Working days. Each location has its own working week. Most run Monday to Friday, but an office whose week runs Sunday to Thursday is configured as such, not forced into someone else's calendar.
• A holiday calendar. Each location keeps its own list of non-working days. A holiday can be a one-off date or marked Same date every year, so fixed holidays such as 1 May or 25 December are entered once and repeat.

Under each location sit its floors (each with its own floor plan) and its parking maps, which can describe several areas — for example an underground garage and an outdoor lot. Employees pick the location, then the floor or parking area, and see only what is physically there.

Katarzyna's setup, step by step

1. Create the three locations. In the organisation settings, on the Locations tab, she adds Kraków, Lisbon and New York, picking the right time zone for each. New York gets America/New_York, so a 9:00 booking there means 9:00 in Manhattan.

2. Set the working week. All three run Monday to Friday, so the default fits. If the company later opens an office with a different week, that location gets its own set of working days.

3. Enter the holidays. For Kraków she adds 3 May and 11 November as yearly holidays; for Lisbon 25 April and 10 June; for New York 4 July. Holidays that move every year, like Easter Monday or Thanksgiving, are entered as one-off dates for the coming year — a short job each December.

4. Upload floors and parking maps per location. Each office gets its own floor plans and parking map, with desks and spots placed on them. The setup follows the same six onboarding steps as a single office, once per site.

5. Print the QR stickers per location. Each location has its own sheet of QR stickers for check-in. If stickers in one office leak — say a photo of the Lisbon floor ends up online — Katarzyna can issue new codes for that location in one go. The location then carries a needs reprint marker until the new sheet is printed, so nobody forgets that the stickers on the walls are now dead.

What employees notice

Most of the benefit is invisible, which is the point.

• The booking form opens on a sensible date. It starts on today, or — if the person already has a booking today — on the next working day of the location, skipping weekends and holidays.
• Recurring bookings skip local holidays. When the Lisbon team books every Thursday for the quarter, 10 June is skipped automatically, and the form reports how many of the weekly dates were booked. In Kraków, the same Thursday is an ordinary working day. More on series in recurring bookings and team anchor days.
• Times are local. A check-in deadline in New York is a New York time. Calendar invitations for a recurring series carry their weekly rule in the location's time zone, so they do not drift by an hour when daylight saving changes on different dates in Europe and the US.
• Everyone uses their own language. The interface comes in ten languages — English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) — and each person uses their own; booking e-mails are localised too. A confirmation also says exactly where: location, floor and space, for example "HQ Kraków · Floor 3 · D-301", with a button that shows it on the map.
• Room tablets speak the local language. A meeting-room kiosk tablet has its language set on the device, so the lobby in Lisbon and the one in New York can differ.

Practical tips

• Agree on location names people recognise. "Kraków HQ" and "Lisbon" beat internal codes; the name appears in every confirmation e-mail.
• Do the holiday calendar once a year. Yearly holidays carry over by themselves; moveable ones need a few minutes each December.
• Treat a sticker rotation and the reprint as one task. From the moment codes are reissued, the old stickers stop working, so plan the rotation for when the new sheet can go up the same day.
• Check the policy fits every site. The check-in deadline and how far ahead people can book are set once for the whole organisation. Pick values that work in your strictest and your most relaxed office alike.

Scope: what is per location and what is not

Time zone, working days, holidays, floors, parking maps and QR sticker sheets are per location. The booking policy — the check-in deadline and the maximum number of days ahead someone can book — is organisation-wide; you cannot give Lisbon a different deadline from Kraków. Holidays are skipped by recurring series and by the date suggestion, but they are not locked: someone who deliberately picks a holiday can still book it, which is useful when an office opens for a special day.

The number of locations depends on the plan: Start (free) has one, Standard up to three, Pro up to ten, and Enterprise has no practical limit. Pricing is per bookable object — desks, parking spots and meeting rooms — not per user; see pricing.

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