Not a particularly sexy topic, availability calendars can be difficult to work with and have led to more than the occasional problem for many home owners, but they are an important aspect of advertising and managing your holiday rental property, so it's worth a few minutes talking about them.
I'm sure we all know what an availability calendar is and what it is for but just so we are all on the same page, we are talking about the calendar that is displayed on your property advert or website that indicates your properties availability to potential guests.
When Calendars Go Wrong
You'd think having a calendar would be a simple job, you block out any dates that you don't want to rent out your property for and then mark the rest as available.
When bookings come in you update the calendar with the booked dates, marking them as unavailable.
Simple right?
Well, in an ideal world yes, it would (and should) totally work like that.
In reality though many home owners have adverts on multiple listing sites, they may even have their own website, and that's when the fun headaches begin.
The problem is keeping calendars in sync across multiple listings and your own website (if you have one).
Let's say you advertise on AirBnb and on VRBO.
Both AirBnb and VRBO allow guests to book your property instantly online. When a guest does that on AirBnb then the calendar on AirBnb automatically blocks out those dates so you can't double book anyone.
It's fully automated and works great.
The problem is your VRBO advert does not know about your AirBnb booking so it doesn't mark those dates as blocked, this in turn means that you could get double booked if someone books the same, or even slightly overlapping dates on VRBO.
In this scenario the best outcome is that you realise and decide which guests to let down, the worst outcome is a complete nightmare of having two sets of guests arriving at your property at the same time.
I've heard more than one horror story of this happening.
How Prevent This
One way to stop this happening is to manually update all your property adverts calendars every time you accept a new booking.
It's a bit tedious but can work if you only list your property in a few places.
You are always slightly at risk of forgetting to update one of the calendars or waking up to a flurry of overlapping bookings though.
The better way to manage this is to setup automatic calendar synchronisation.
In this scenario once you accept a booking on AirBnb your calendar with this is automatically updated as we have discussed. Then a special file called an 'ical' file is updated with a record of the booked dates.
This 'ical' file is then published online and other websites or services can read from it and use the information to block out dates on their calendars.
ical sync is a one way process, you have to tell VRBO the address of your AirBnb ical file and then it reads this file regularly throughout the day. VRBO will also publish an ical file for bookings it secures for you, you then tell AirBnb the location of your VRBO ical file and it also regularly checks for changes.
Reading and updating availability calendars via multiple ical files is a bit of a nightmare to setup in terms of a programming challenge, so much so that I've seen a few services aimed at holiday home owners that avoid them and force you to manually keep calendars updated.
After writing the programming code to read and manage ical files myself I realised what I thought would be a straight forward task was actually really complex.
I can fully understand why some other sites and services decided to swerve the subject altogether!
All that being said we do have a fully functioning ical synchronisation service, simply enter the web address of your VRBO, AirBnb, or any other ical source and dates on your listing with us will be blocked out automatically on your advert.
You can also block out any other dates on our system and an ical file we publish can be setup on your AirBnb and VRBO listing to block those dates from being double booked at their end.
It's a great way of ensuring all your adverts are always up to date and takes the hassle out of having to manually manage multiple calendars.
If you aren't using icals then you probably should be, and if you already list with someone else and take a listing with us then you can easily setup the ical sync in just a minute or two when creating your new advert.