Availability calendar for your holiday home: how to get it right

Why a good availability calendar makes the difference

If you rent out your holiday home in several places, you know the problem: you have to keep track everywhere of when the property is free. A paper diary or Excel sheet works at first, but you soon run into its limits. You miss a booking, you accidentally give someone the same week twice, or you no longer see for yourself what the summer looks like.

A digital availability calendar solves that. Not by automating the work, because a large part stays manual, but by bringing everything together in one place and keeping it clear at all times.

What goes wrong with paper and Excel

A notebook or a paper diary has one big advantage: everyone understands it. But it stops there too. You cannot share it with a partner who also takes bookings. You cannot check it on your phone when you are out and about. And if you offer the property on three platforms, you keep three lists that quickly stop matching.

Excel goes a step further. You can build your own overview per month, assign colours, and share the file through Google Drive. For one property and one host that works reasonably well. As soon as a second person looks along, or as soon as you want to synchronise with Airbnb, it falls apart. Excel is not made for real-time collaboration and certainly not for integration with external platforms.

The most common consequences are double bookings (two guests at the same time), forgetting cleaning periods between stays, and guests who ask for a date you cannot answer straight away because your diary is not to hand.

What a digital calendar does offer

A good availability calendar for your holiday home does a few things well:

• An overview per month or week. You see at a glance when the property is occupied, when there is an option pending, and when it is free.
• Access on phone and computer. You can answer questions from interested guests right away, even when you are not at your desk.
• Notes per booking. Arrival time, key arrangement, particulars about the guest. Everything in one place, visible as soon as you open the period.
• iCal synchronisation. Your calendar exports an iCal link that external platforms read automatically. That way your availability on Airbnb, Booking.com and your own website is up to date at the same time.
• Embed on your own website. Visitors to your website see straight away which periods are free, without you having to do anything for it.

How to set up an availability calendar

Start simple. You do not need an elaborate system to get going. A free tool such as Rentiplanner lets you create a calendar for your property within a few minutes. You give the calendar a name, fill in your first bookings, and you have an overview straight away.

Then check which platforms you use. If you are on Airbnb and Booking.com, those are two extra places where your availability is managed. By setting the iCal link of your calendar as an export feed, you only have to make changes in one place. The platforms fetch the update automatically.

After that, add the embed to your own website if you have one. Guests who enquire with you directly then see straight away what is free. That saves back-and-forth emails.

Which information do you keep track of

What you keep track of per booking as a minimum:

• Name of the guest
• Arrival and departure date
• Number of people
• Agreed price or a reference to your quote
• Payment status

Depending on how you work, you can also add arrival time, key instructions or special arrangements. The more you fill in here, the less you have to search in other notes or separate documents.

Switching from an existing system

If you have been working with Excel or another system for a while, you do not have to move everything over at once. Put the future bookings in your new calendar first. The historical bookings stay where they are; you rarely need them for the daily running.

Make sure the people who look along also know the new tool and can use it. That is often the biggest hurdle when switching: not the technology, but the habit.

Common mistakes when managing availability

The most common mistake is updating afterwards. You agree something over the phone, you say "I will write that in later", and then you forget it. It is better to keep the calendar up to date while you are speaking to the guest, or right after.

A second pitfall is forgetting the days in between. If one guest leaves on Sunday and the next arrives on Monday, you need cleaning time in between. If you do not block that day in your calendar, you accidentally book someone in while your property is not yet ready.

When setting up iCal synchronisation, make sure you check regularly whether the link still works. Platforms sometimes change their settings, which means a feed is no longer read. You only notice that when there is a double booking.

Getting started

A good availability calendar does not take hours to set up. Choose a tool that works on phone and computer, that supports iCal, and that can show the availability grid on your website. Rentiplanner is such an availability calendar for holiday-home hosts: free for one property and set up without technical knowledge. You create an account, fill in your first booking, and your calendar is ready.

Detailed planning starts with a good overview. And that overview starts with an availability calendar you can check anytime, anywhere.