Writing Meeting Confirmations Customers Won't Misread

A customer who shows up an hour late because of a time zone mixup is a small disaster. Not only is the call ruined, but you’ve now left them wondering whether the miscommunication was their fault — which is not a great way to start a relationship.

Calendar invites handle the conversion automatically, but confirmation emails don’t. Anytime you write a time in an email, include UTC alongside the local time:

Looking forward to our call on Thursday 19 June at 15:00 UTC (11am EDT / 4pm BST).

UTC is the one reference that always works — it doesn’t shift with daylight saving, and any recipient can verify it.

Check your calendar time zone settings. When you create an invite, use your full IANA zone name (America/New_York, not just “Eastern Time”) if your calendar app exposes that setting. This matters because “Eastern Time” is ambiguous to tools that need to calculate whether you’re on EST or EDT.

If you’re near a clock-change date, say so. A meeting booked two weeks before a DST transition can silently shift by an hour when the clocks change. Add a note:

The US moves to EDT on 9 March — this meeting is booked after that change. If you’re in Europe, double-check your calendar shows the right time.

Send a reminder the day before with the time written out again. Calendars don’t always sync correctly, and a lot can happen between booking a meeting and attending one. A short reminder that includes the time in both UTC and their local zone is cheap insurance against a no-show.

For high-stakes calls, drop a meetwhen link in the confirmation — they can verify the time in their own city without doing any mental arithmetic.