Never worry about double bookings
Sync your bookings by using the Airbnb multicalendar tool and iCal
How to handle multiple listings and bookings from multiple sites
See also our other websites:
Similar websites to Airbnb
- How to easily manage multiple properties for rent
- How to easily handle bookings from multiple websites and channels
- How to easily change prices and block dates manually
I've rented out several rooms and flats since 3 years. I've welcomed hundreds of happy guests from all over the world and the income from this business makes me eligible to pay down my morgange fast and earn some good money. Besides, it's lots of fun. On this website I'm writing about my experience and I'm giving tips to other property owners.
See also: 10 websites similar to airbnb.
Advertising your properties and accomodations on multiple sites gives your property more exposure, and more exposure means more bookings and earnings. In addition to Airbnb, I'm advertising my flats, rooms and houses for rent on the following websites:
However, administrating multiple listings and bookings from more sites also involves more work. Fortunately, there are several free tools to make this job a lot easier and nearly automated. I'll explain below.
Airbnb multicalendar tool
One of the most important tools I use to handle my bookings is the Airbnb multicalendar tool. It's free and easy to use. To use this tool, you need to sign up for a free profile on Airbnb.com, the worlds leading marketplace for property owners and travellers. Creating a profile for your listings is fast and easy, and once you have created one listing for each of your rooms / flats / properties you can use their multicalendar tool to get an easy overview of your bookings. Myself, I manage 9 properties, and my multicalender looks something like this:
There is one row for each property. I manage 11 rooms and flats, but the mulicalendar tool can be useful to handle both a bigger and smaller amount of properties.
The red fields are bookings from Airbnb. When I accept a booking, the dates automatically get blocked in the calendar.
The pink fields are bookings from other sites I use to promote my properties, such as Roomorama, Holidaylettings, VRBO, Flipkey and others. You can read more about my recommended alternatives to Airbnb here. These fields are either manually blocked by myself or automatically imported through the ICAL connection, see more about the ICAL tool below. The multicalendar tool allows me to manually block dates and write comments, very useful to keep a good overview.
The white fields are the dates still available for rent. If I click on these I can change the price or block the dates manually if I for some reason don't want to rent out my properties for a specific period of time.
The iCal connection tool
The iCal connection tools allows you to syncronize multiple booking calendars. If you're advertising your properties and receiving booking from multiple sites and channels, the iCal is extremely helpful to avoid double bookings and to keep your calendars updated at all time. You can syncronize calendars accross different booking websites, such as VRBO, Booking.com, Holidaylettings, Wimdu and others, and you can also send the information to your Outlook calendar or Gmail calendar. When you receive a booking from one site, the calendar on the other sites will automatically be updated. This is a great way to avoid double bookings, inquires on dates that are not available and time consuming manual updates.
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