Tip Four: Using Availability Calendars

Calendars

Having an online calendar is considered essential, by many, when advertising your property. It saves both your customers and your own time by letting them know which dates are available or not to rent. Using a calendar means that you will not receive queries for the times when you have already rented.

Some owners prefer not to use a calendar. The argument is that they may be able to persuade a customer to rent another week which is available. Whilst some customers are flexible, most already have dates in mind and apart from peak periods can be flexible with choice of accommodation rather than dates. No calendar can actually put potential customers off from making a query in the first place.

Rental calendars are available from several sources, some are free and others demand a small yearly fee. We show an example of both here.

Rentcalendar

Rentcalendar is a free calendar that is simple to use and which can be embeded into one or a multiple number of sites and can be managed from one control panel. Go to www.rentcalendar.com to get to the logon screen.

Get started by clicking on 'Create New Account' and register. All should be straightforward here

When logged in you will see that you need to add your property.

Adding your property

To add your property click on the "Add new calendar". Add the details of your property, including the property page (although I have not seen this work.

Start adding the details for your rental property. Remember to go though each of the tabs, including the information about your website if you have one. This means that the title will become a link straight to your website.

If you are fortunate to have more than one property you can add as many as you need.

(note to bafriend users need the property id. In this example it is 39209).

Updating availability

Click on 'edit availability' to update the calendar. Enter the start and end dates for the booking and you add notes such as the name of the customer and/or other specific requirements.

Getting HTML code

Once you have your calendar go to web integration and you can choose how to would like to use your calender, and then cut and paste from here into your web page. Your site will have an updated copy of your calendar.

When you get a new booking, log into Rentcalendar, add the booking, and it will be instantly shown on the calendar in your website.

Related resources

• Winning pictures
• Writing a rental contract
• Email etiquette