A vacation rental booking calendar, also known as a vacation rental availability calendar, is an excellent resource for tracking your reservations and avoiding double bookings.
If you are in the vacation rental business, organization and efficiency are key. This means relying on all the tools that are available to help you rent out your home. And while it comes as no surprise, one of the most important tools for any property manager is a booking calendar.
An availability calendar can help vacation rental owners and property managers run their businesses with ease while achieving high occupancy rates. To help you out, we’ve created a free vacation rental calendar template that you can start using today. Download it in the form below!
Don’t see the form to download our Vacation Rental Calendar? Click here.
What is a vacation rental calendar?
A vacation rental calendar is a specialized availability calendar for organizing bookings. It’s an essential tool for any property manager renting out their home on a nightly basis. Some calendars are simple, stand-alone applications, while others form part of a wider software service.
Advantages of a vacation rental booking calendar
Any host wanting to rent their property out to travelers will need a booking calendar on their vacation rental website.
When using optimized software, the availability calendar will synchronize all your bookings from your website and different listing sites onto a single platform. This channel manager feature gives travelers real-time availability while owners get quick access to existing reservation details.
Let’s say you have your property listed on Airbnb and Booking.com. Instead of having to manually check each listing site every time a reservation is made, a vacation rental booking calendar will keep you updated at all times without fearing double bookings.
Additional benefits of using a centralized availability calendar
Having a centralized vacation rental booking calendar positively affects different aspects of your business. For hotel or vacation rental cleaning staff, these calendars can help you save a lot of effort.
Instead of having to notify your staff about every reservation, your availability booking calendar will do the work for you. With access to just one easy-to-manage calendar and inbox combination, your staff can quickly accept or reject requests. It also allows them to block off certain periods of time as unavailable and gives a clear overview of their entire schedule.
A booking calendar makes your guests more comfortable as well. They get real-time information on current bookings and can view availability for their own reservation dates. When a traveler makes a reservation directly using software that links to a reservation calendar, it automatically updates this for your staff as well.
One of the key advantages of using an availability calendar is that it saves time. By being able to access important information at a glance, owners have no trouble finding the information needed. This allows them to spend more time on business operations.
How to make use of a vacation rental availability calendar
There are several ways that you can make use of a booking calendar to help scale your vacation rental business. First, it’s important to recognize that not only do you have the operational responsibilities of the property itself, there are also plenty of administrative tasks. Among these, you have to market your holiday property.
In order to do this, you need to provide a lot of information to prospective guests. This takes time and the information provided must be accurate. You will have to set up an excellent rental description, along with high-quality images. Your potential guests must be able to see your rates, and most importantly, they will want to see the dates that the property is available to rent.
The most effective way to offer this kind of information to your guests is with a vacation rental availability calendar.
Features of a vacation rental booking calendar
This type of calendar has other purposes besides just showing you the dates on which your rentals are available.
If you have multiple properties, the calendar should allow guests to switch from one property to another. This way travelers can easily check their reservations or gather other information at a glance. As a result, they won’t spend any unnecessary time trying to determine when and what properties are available.
Advertising availability on third-party sites
You can become a host easily on any of the online listing sites. When you do this, you will have access to their built-in calendar that will allow you to track each booking that is made. Visitors who want to make a reservation can check out the large list of rentals that are available on this site, and then book the one that suits them the best.
Travelers make their choices based on the property features, amenities, availability, and rates. As a host, using sites like Airbnb allows you to promote your home to thousands of potential travelers. The downside, however, is that your listing shows alongside your competitors and you are faced with commission fees.
Advertising your vacation rental on your own website
There is a lot of information that a traveler needs when they want to make a reservation on your property website. As the host, you can use your vacation rental calendar to help you keep the information that you are supplying to potential guests accurate and up-to-date.
Investing in software with a website builder and a built-in calendar can help you track bookings from day one.
Choosing the right reservation calendar software
You will find that you have plenty of choices when it comes to vacation rental software. However, there are a few things to keep in mind when doing so.
First, you want an application that is easy to use and has all of the functionalities that are important to you. You should be able to easily pull in information from third-party listing sites and have a good support team behind you. Last but not least, the short-term rental software that you decide to go with should be affordable.
When deciding the right software for your rental business, take your time and review different options carefully.
Should you use a free vacation rental calendar?
The short answer is yes! To really maximize the potential of your rental property, you need to know when you have bookings and when your property is available. A free vacation rental booking calendar allows you to do this.
Thanks to the Internet, you can find a variety of vacation rental calendar excel templates online that are simple to use.
Download our free vacation rental calendar template
By using vacation rental software or downloading this free rental booking calendar, you can start efficiently tracking your business. Instead of worrying about overbookings or an empty calendar, you can focus your energy on building a vacation rental strategy and taking your service to the next level.
Don’t see the form to download our Vacation Rental Calendar? Click here.
