Calendar and availability

Your availability calendar decides which dates guests can request. Everything in this article lives on one page: Dashboard → Availability. That is where you block dates, set the gap between stays, export your calendar to other apps and import calendars from other platforms.

Blocking dates manually

Click a date or drag across a range to block it. Blocked dates appear greyed out and guests cannot request them. Use this for your own stays, maintenance, or any time you want dates kept off the calendar.

Click a blocked date again to unblock it.

Gap between bookings

At the top of the Availability page, under Buffer after each booking, choose how many days to keep free after every stay. With a two-day buffer, a stay that ends on Friday keeps Saturday and Sunday blocked, so the next guest can arrive on Monday at the earliest. Most owners use it for cleaning and changeover.

How approved bookings affect the calendar

When you approve a booking, every night of that stay is blocked automatically. Other guests cannot request those dates, and you cannot unblock them by hand until the stay is over.

Exporting your calendar to Airbnb, Google Calendar and other apps

Every property on PrivateStay has a private calendar link. Any app that can import or subscribe to an external calendar can read it, so your PrivateStay bookings and blocked dates appear there as well.

1. On the Availability page, scroll below the calendar and click Export your calendar.
2. For Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook, use the button for that app.
3. For Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com or any other platform, copy the link shown under Airbnb, Vrbo and other apps and paste it where that platform lets you import a calendar. On most platforms this is in the listing's calendar or availability settings, next to the option to export their own calendar.

The export contains your approved bookings and the dates you blocked by hand. Dates that PrivateStay itself imported from another calendar are not passed on again, so a platform never receives its own dates back, and your properties cannot block each other by accident (see the last section).

Other apps pull the link on their own schedule. Google Calendar can take up to a day, Airbnb and most other platforms refresh within a few hours, and PrivateStay cannot speed this up. If a booking arrives and the other platform has not caught up yet, block the dates there by hand to be safe.

Importing calendars from Airbnb and other platforms

If your property is also listed elsewhere, import that platform's calendar so dates booked there are blocked on PrivateStay automatically.

1. On the Availability page, scroll down to Import external calendars.
2. Paste the calendar link from the other platform. Look for it in that platform's calendar or availability settings, usually labelled "Export calendar".
3. Give the calendar a name, for example "Airbnb", and click Add feed.

PrivateStay checks every imported calendar automatically each day, and you can press Sync now at any time for an instant update. When a date is freed on the other platform, it is unblocked here on the next sync.

On Free and Plus you can import one external calendar per property. On Pro you can import as many as you need.

One property with several units

Some places can be booked as a whole or as separate units, for example a main house and a guest suite. On PrivateStay, set up each unit as its own property, and add one more property for the whole place.

Then connect them with export and import, following one rule: every property imports directly from each place where a booking can occupy it, never through another property.

Say the units are A and B, and the whole place is C.

• C imports the calendar links of A and B. A booking on either unit now blocks the whole place.
• A and B each import the calendar link of C. A booking of the whole place now blocks both units.
• If the units or the whole place are also listed on another platform, each PrivateStay property imports those platform calendars directly too. C imports the platform calendars of A, B and the whole place. A imports the platform calendars of A and the whole place. B does the same for B.

Because the export never passes imported dates on, a booking of unit A reaches C and stops there. It cannot flow on to unit B through C's calendar. That is why the setup works, and why each property has to import its sources directly.