Free unused meeting rooms

Turn on automatic room release to free up booked meeting rooms that are no longer needed. Booked rooms are released when all but one person declines the meeting. When a room is released, an email notification is sent.

Use the Room Insights Dashboard to help you analyze room releases for your organization. With the Room insights dashboard you can see the total number of released room hours, rebooked hours, and unreleased hours.

This feature is only available for G Suite Business, Enterprise, and Enterprise for Education editions.

Turn room releases on or off

Turn on automatic room release for one or more rooms.

Sign in to your Google Admin console.
Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).
From the Admin console Home page, go to Buildings and resources.
Next to one or more resources, check the box.
At the top, click the Down arrow next to Edit.
Click Edit Calendar-based room release.
Change the setting state to On or Off.
Click Apply.

Fix unwanted room releases

You can reduce unwanted room releases with a thoughtful choice of room and organizer exceptions. Calendar includes logic to help, but your choice of rooms and user groups are critical.

Calendar's room release logic

Calendar doesn’t release meeting rooms when:

Guests decline less than 10 minutes before a meeting starts
Meetings are set up ad-hoc within the next 30 minutes
The meeting is a room hold which is booked directly on the room's calendar
The meeting lasts longer than 3 hours
The room for the same meeting was previously released and then re-added
The meeting has no guests apart from the organizer
The meeting is booked on a secondary calendar

Choose rooms to release

Google recommends that most of your rooms have automatic room release turned on, except for rooms that are:

Frequently used by important employees
For example, CEOs private room.

Used for business-critical functions
For example, rooms reserved for hiring, client meetings, or special events.

Restricted for most employees
Used by external guests not invited to the event

Choose room organizers

Exclude users from automatic room release who:

Create the meetings for VIP employees
Frequently book meetings for others but don’t attend
Are high-level executive
Set up business-critical and external-facing meetings

Exclude user groups in the Admin Console

To remove a user group from automatic room releases, you need an administrator account with Services > Calendar and Groups > Read privileges. See Assign administrator roles to a user or Create custom administrator roles for instructions.

From the Admin console Home page, click Buildings and resources.
Under Room settings, click Exempt user group.
Under Exclude user group, click Add group name here.
Enter the user group and click Save.