How to Manage Your Rental Property and Calendar

by Alex Adams Freelance Writer / Blogger

Anyone who ever tried to manage a calendar for short term rental bookings in the bad old, pre-computer days, will remember the horror of it all. Wall charts, either home designed for the purpose, or bought ready made, white boards, maybe a separate diary for every property (horribly expensive, and all too easy to put the wrong information in the wrong book).

Enquiries, reservations, booking confirmed with actual deposits, and then the inevitable cancellations to cope with too! Things written in pencil, in green pen, red pen, struck over and rewritten. By the end of the year the chart looked like some elaborate military operation, and the chances of retrieving all of that valuable information about past customers was minimal!

It's not that it wasn't possible, of course it was possible, it was just complicated and all too prone to mistakes creeping in.

Thank heavens for computers, above all thank heavens for computer based booking calendars that can be easily synced across different advertising routes. A decent calendar makes the whole business so much easier, all you have to do is remember to update it and 90% of your booking management system is taken care of.

Better yet, you can display your calendar on your website. Apart from the fact that this saves you from the hassle of replying to people enquiring about dates you have no vacancies for, it also means potential customers can see the times when you do have space for them. Everything seems to be such a rush these days, and some folk have to approach booking their holiday, with the same eye to managing their time that they give to the rest of their life.

Lets put it this way, you and a competitor have similar properties, both have attractive pictures, they're in the place your potential customer would like to go and your pricing structure is similar. One of you has a calendar clearly showing that you a vacancy for the time the person would like to come, with a hyper-link to an enquiry from. The other has a friendly invitation to email for availability information. Who do you suppose gets first crack at the customer?

There's really no reason not to display your calendar on your website. Any decent vacation rentals management software package will include a calendar that can be embedded into your advertising website, and which will update automatically across all your advertising platforms.

You don't have to spend a fortune on your software, though of course the more properties you're managing the more it will need to do. More complex systems will be more expensive than entry level packages but will more than earn their investment back in the time they will save you.