Hotels
Vacation rentals
Airlines
Destinations
Travel agencies
Cruises
Car rentals
Financial institutions
Grow your holiday rental business by welcoming guests who spend more, stay longer and bring the whole family.
BLOG POST
Checklist: Get ready for your first holiday rental booking
This checklist is designed to help you earn your first booking quickly. From syncing your calendars to setting up your rates, find out how to get your listing booking-ready.
Booking-ready checklist
When your listing’s new, it can be a challenge to get those first few bookings. To help out with that, we’ve created a checklist of key actions that you can take to make your listing a booking magnet. Now go forth and conquer—we’re cheering you on!
Calendar
Having an up-to-date calendar is key to getting bookings and preventing cancellations. Make sure that your calendar’s all set by taking care of these steps.
Sync your calendars
Managing multiple calendars for your business? Leverage calendar syncing to save time and avoid double bookings. Calendar syncing automatically keeps your calendar on our platform up to date with any other calendars you may have on websites such as Google, Booking.com or Airbnb.
Double-check your availability
Because people and technology can make mistakes, it’s important to double-check that your calendar shows the correct blocked and unblocked dates. Pro tip: You can also put on your ‘traveller hat’ and search with different dates on our website or app to confirm that your calendar shows the correct availability.
Review your booking window
Choose how far in advance and how close to the stay date you’d like to accept bookings. Pro tip: Many travellers make holiday plans a year in advance or more, so it’s a good idea to set your window over a year out to make sure that you can capture those bookings.
Confirm your minimum stay setting
We recommend keeping your minimum stay to three nights or less. That length of time maximises the number of searches you appear in and helps fill all available nights in your calendar.
Rates
Travellers care about cost. In fact, price is the most important factor in booking decisions for the majority of travellers. That doesn’t mean you need to lowball your rates to get bookings—but it does mean that it could pay to be strategic with your pricing. Take these steps to maximise your rental income while staying competitive.
Add custom rates and discounts
Scroll through your calendar and make sure that the rate you see on each date is the rate you want to charge. Pro tip: It’s a good idea to add custom rates for any busy seasons, public holidays or special events in your area to ensure that you’re earning top dollar for those premium dates.
Add weekly and monthly rates
Fill up calendar blocks quickly by offering guests a price break for longer stays. To implement this strategy, simply set up weekly and monthly discounts.
Review your payment terms
Paying for the full stay upfront may be a barrier to booking for some. Consider allowing for more flexibility by letting guests break up their payment into instalments.
Property details
Travellers often make the decision to book or not based largely on a listing’s property details page. Take these steps to make yours the type of listing that gets travellers to stop scrolling and book your home.
Preview your property like a traveller
Preview your listing to see what travellers see when they look at your property online. This is a great way to identify updates you might want to make to your photos, description and amenities.
From your dashboard, click on the image of your listing above ‘Dashboard’ to preview.
Review your photos and add more
Stunning pictures drive bookings by helping your listing stand out from the rest. Review your photos, upload more and add captions to really make your place come to life.
Add more property amenities
Maximise the number of times your listing shows up in searches by adding every single amenity your property has to offer. Pro tip: Seriously, no detail is too small. Travellers often filter searches for properties by their amenities, and you don’t want to miss out on a listing view just because a box isn’t ticked that ought to be.
Policies
When you first go live, we choose certain default policies on your behalf. But you know your needs better than we do, so make sure that you review these policies and update any preference you’d like to change.
Review your cancellation policy
The default selection we choose is a ‘relaxed’ cancellation policy. On this policy, guests will get a full refund if they cancel more than 14 days before check-in. They’ll be refunded 50% if they cancel 7 days before check-in.
Set up your house rules
House rules put you in control of the types of guests who can stay at your property. Travellers have to agree to your house rules before they can book your place.
To review your cancellation policy and house rules, log in to your Vrbo dashboard and visit Property > Rules and policies.
Take action
Help earn more bookings quickly by meeting—and exceeding—guest expectations. Head to your dashboard to complete the checklist.
Keep up to date
Sign up to let us know you'd like to be notified of future blog content.
Was this page helpful?
Tell us how we did so we can improve our site.
