How do you keep track of bookings across platforms?

I have been using a spreadsheet and manually inputting the information for bookings across platforms so I can keep on top of check-in dates and cleaning crew etc.
Airbnb is by far the most bookings, but we do have other platforms and private as well.
Any tips and tricks out there of what others use.
I just find the spreadsheet archaic IMOO.

I have been using a spreadsheet since 2013 when we first started hosting out of our home. I also use iCal for bookings, cleanings, and improvements - my husband and I share our calendars so we are both in the loop with what is happening that day.

We have a lot of information in our spreadsheet including some charts and graphs. We have names, booking method, CI date CO date, how many nights, how many guests, contact date, how many days notice, whether it was an instant book (they all are now), all the money info, how many guest reviews, hometown, state, country, the date certain messages have been sent, if they wrote in the guestbook, if they left a review, our ratings, comments, covid info (not required any longer), if they booked with a certain rental car company (incentives), their flight arrival/departure times (we’re on an island so everyone needs to fly in/out), rating we gave the guest and finally the reviews (just in case Air decides to update their website and our reviews are lost).

All this info allows us to have an occupancy summary and populate our charts and graphs :slight_smile: It’s a lot of info and probably “too much info” and not for everyone, but we really like all the data.

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I use a channel manager, ownerres. Everything syncs there and it works really well for me.

RR

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Someone told me smoobu is good. Haven’t tried it myself though.

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Sounds much like what we are doing. Thanks for the details-we should add some of those details that you are capturing . Guess we are on the right track!

We’ll check that out! Thanks!

I use a spreadsheet to track all my bookings across AirBnB and BDC. I started with AirBnB but for some reason now most of my bookings are from BDC. I import the calendar from AirBnB to BDC so if somebody books on AirBnB BDC automatically blocks out the dates. But I have never been able to get the reverse to work so as soon as somebody books BDC I manually go into the AirBnB calendar and block out those dates.

I also put the bookings into my Google calendar, for the date/time of the booking and a reminder 24 hours before to remind me to send check-in information

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@lchiu7 Interesting about BDC. We do have VRBO linked and it does sync, however not very well. We still need to manually block day before for prep. Good idea about the calendar. Do you do that manually or can you export the data directly from BDC to your calendar?

I created a listing on BDC a few years ago. When I asked about calendars syncing, the representative told me they only sync every eight hours.

I second OwnerRez and I highly recommend it. @muddy are you on the unofficial owner rez fb page? Now I may try to determine who you are.

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Nope. I don’t participate in Facebook at all, or any other social media. If you want to see my listing, try looking for private room homeshares for 1 guest in Sayulita. Mine’s called Unique Tropical for Solo Traveler.

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No, it’s not. It’s called, just like other rooms, “Private room in Sayulita”, but I can’t tell which one it is. So this means that if folks look for it with that title, they won’t find it. Please PM me the link so that I can bookmark it.

Yay, Chesky! :frowning:

When I look at the “Preview” of my listing, it has the same old title. I haven’t looked for it incognito yet with a regular search. I thought they only were using those generic titles for the category searches. PMing you the link.

They use those generic titles for the “All Homes” category. Your specific title doesn’t show until you click on the listing

Thanks for the explanation.

What is BDC? I’m not familiar with that one.

Booking dot com…

Duh!! Thanks! My brain wasn’t awake yet!

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I just enter the data in the Google calendar manually. But that does give me an idea. If I am able to export the iCAL from AirBnB to BDC I should be able to import it into the Google calendar

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ok, i’ll go ahead and out myself as the old school person.
I have one of those large desk calendars pad thingys. one month to a large A3 page and i write all my bookings on that. It’s on my desk with computer, keyboard on top, like my command centre. We have 3 listings. I just put a name and #people. i also make notes of me being paid, and if i did the review. I keep a real diary with daily notes of things i might need to check (like early check in, portacot requests etc). I like the tactile nature of a physical piece of paper, coloured pens and being able to scribble notes. and the joy of a fresh month and the clean paper is something i look forward to.

I am also a spreadsheet lover and I do also keep records of guests to get some stats for myself on age, location etc (something abb should be doing for us IMHO) but i don’t think i’ll keep that going for more than 1 year.

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