There used to be an excellent option on italki called "Instant Tutoring" but italki deleted it last year for some reason. With that option you could book any tutor with the "Instant Tutoring" badge on their profile and take your 30 minutes lesson right away.

Now you can only book a lesson 12 hours before lesson time.

You are welcome, Peter 🍀

Italki comes up with unneeded ideas with every new release and they take down some good features.

Personally I think they removed instant tutoring because it used to create many disputes. It's a delicate feature as teachers need to stick to their laptops in case anyone booked them because they have to accept or refuse in a very short time. This is what is instant tutoring is all about. Some teachers used to miss the sound of instant tutoring notification and if that happened a few times in a row and they didn't respond to the lesson request, their instant tutoring privileges would be taken down.

I had no idea that instant tutoring was that popular among teachers and students until after it was taken down by italki. Italki of course said they have better plans and after a while they launched a new feature which allowed students to book 12 hours in advance. This created more problems because with the different time zones, some teachers missed lessons requests from students during their sleep.

Bottomline, instant tutoring + booking 24 hours in advance were better options and a win-win situation for everyone.

If italki employees used italki to teach or book lessons, they would have had different approach to what is good or bad for the website. They hardly ever use italki though 😁

Thank you Mumtaz. Exactly! I do remember reading about being able to do that. I wonder why Italki removed this service?

Ah. I misunderstood your question, perhaps because I've never tried to do that myself. In any case, Mumtaz has already answered your question.

Should be easy. You are in the UK and France is just one hour ahead. Moreover when you search for a teacher in any language, there is a filter for availability where you can select what time in your local time zone you are looking at. This ensures that only those teachers who have bookable slots at that time appear in the search results. There are other search filters as well such as price, country and native speaker, but this is the one that's relevant to your question.