In three instances, appointments made with local businesses have been off by 1 hour.
Two of those instances were scheduled pick-up times at a local pizza restaurant. Twice, we showed up 1 hour before their scheduling system said the order should be ready.
Once, we scheduled an appointment for a pedicure and showed up 1 hour earlier than they expected.
The appointments have been made from two laptops. Both laptops time zones are set correctly.
We noticed the email confirmation for the pedicure indicated the scheduled time was scheduled in the time zone west of us, i.e., the time zone where the time is 1 hour earlier than our time zone.
Where else might a time zone be set that affects interaction with web sites?
I searched for this type of problem. Too many of the results are about time zones in Outlook calendars. Outlook is involved in these transactions.
A few observations:
- the pizza place and pedicure business use different scheduling software
- Looking at the pizza place's scheduling page HTML, I can see the pick-up times are expressed as GMT times internally and local time zones in the presentation layer. For example, this is the HTML for 6 PM locally. It is correctly recognizing the time zone.
<option data-testid="fulfillment-selector-time" value="2021-05-10T22:00:00+0000">6:00 PM</option>
- the pedicure scheduling page's HTML shows the correct time zone too
<a resourcekey="r737a1531318822221" data-company_time="11/May/2021 12:00 EDT">12:00 pm</a>