A booking calendar for your B&B: what should your booking system show you every day?

Short answer: a booking calendar for your B&B shows, per room and per night, whether that room is free, booked or blocked, and for every booking who is coming, through which channel and whether they have paid. More importantly, it is the only calendar that counts. Booking.com, Airbnb and your own website follow it, not the other way round. As soon as you keep two calendars side by side, a double booking is only a matter of time.

Almost every B&B starts with something else: a notebook next to the phone, a Google calendar with a colour per room, or simply the calendar in the Booking.com extranet. That works as long as there is one channel and one person keeping track. From the second channel onwards it starts to pinch. Below is what a booking calendar really has to do, and what to look for when you choose one.

A calendar per room, not per day

An ordinary calendar thinks in appointments: "Tuesday 2pm, dentist". A B&B thinks in room nights: room 2 is taken from Friday to Sunday, room 3 only on Saturday. That is why a planning board works better than a diary: rooms listed down the side, days across the top, and every booking as a bar from arrival to departure day.

That way you see at a glance what a diary hides:

• the single night between two bookings that you can still sell, or are better off blocking;
• which rooms need turning over tomorrow, because someone is leaving;
• whether a family that wants three nights fits in one room or has to switch.

With only one or two rooms or a single holiday rental, a plain month view is sometimes easier to read. A good booking system lets you choose.

What you should see on every booking

A bar with just a name is a start. What you also want to see without clicking:

1. The channel. Did the booking come in directly, through Booking.com or through Airbnb? That decides who pays you, which terms apply and where you make a change.
2. The payment status. Paid in full, deposit received, or nothing yet. Especially for direct bookings you want to know before the guest is at the door.
3. Today's status. Is this guest arriving today, already checked in, or gone?
4. Anything special. A birthday, an allergy, a guest who was difficult last time.

In BedFlow PMS this is the room overview: the colour of the bar is the channel, a small triangle on the left shows payment, one on the right shows status, and coloured dots are labels such as Birthday or Watch out.

One calendar is in charge

This is where it usually goes wrong. A host puts a phone booking in their Google calendar but forgets to close the night on Booking.com. Or they block a room for personal use on Airbnb but not on their website. Two calendars means two versions of the truth.

The fix is one calendar where everything goes in, and which feeds every channel:

• a Booking.com booking appears on the planning board by itself and closes that night on Airbnb and on your own site;
• a phone booking you enter yourself does the same;
• a room you block for maintenance or holidays closes everywhere.

How fast that happens depends on the connection. With an iCal link, platforms only fetch your calendar every so often, and they only pass on availability, not prices or restrictions. With a real connection through a channel manager, a change goes through straight away. The difference is explained in iCal sync: the downsides and preventing overbookings.

Blocking belongs in the same calendar

A booking calendar is not only for bookings. You also close nights in it: a week of holiday, a room under renovation, family coming to stay. Check two things:

• Can you block one room on one day, but also all rooms for a period in one go?
• Does a block go to your channels automatically, or do you have to close it there separately?

In BedFlow PMS you click a free day to block it, and right-click the date to close all rooms for one day or a period. The block goes to your connected channels in the background, usually within seconds to minutes. More in blocking your calendar for personal use or maintenance.

Prices and occupancy in the same view

A planning board that also shows your nightly rate in the free cells makes pricing decisions easier. You immediately see that the one free weekend in May is still at your standard rate while everything around it is full.

Occupancy per room helps too, ideally next to the same month last year. You see whether one room is lagging behind without having to pull a report.

Does it work on your phone?

Most questions don't arrive while you're at your desk. A guest calls while you're shopping: "Is there still room for two next weekend?" If you can't check that on your phone in ten seconds, you promise to call back, and the guest books somewhere else in the meantime. So check that the calendar stays readable on a small screen.

Checklist: what should your booking calendar do?

What a complete booking system does on top of that, from your own booking engine to invoices, is covered in choosing B&B software: what to look for. What it costs is on the pricing page.

Want to see what one calendar for all your rooms and channels looks like in practice? Try BedFlow PMS free for 30 days at bedflow.eu.