Running a Guesthouse or Small Hotel

One listing per room — Every room you let is its own listing in Airflow, with its own calendar, rates, photos and booking page. Your website pulls them together into one place to search and book.

How rooms work in Airflow

If you rent rooms rather than a whole house, set up one listing for each room. A listing is Airflow’s unit of availability: it has one calendar, one set of rates and seasons, one booking page, one iCal feed and one booking-email address. A room that guests book by name — Room 3, the Garden Suite, the Family Room — maps onto that exactly.

What you get for each room:

• Its own calendar, minimum stay and turnaround days
• Its own nightly rate, seasons and discounts
• Its own photos, sleeping arrangement and amenities
• Its own booking page with the payment options you choose
• Its own iCal feed and its own booking-email address for channel bookings

What stays shared: your organisation, your website, your team, your guest records, your accounting connection and your billing.

Setting up your rooms

When you sign up and choose Guesthouse or B&B or Hotel, lodge or camp as your business type, the set-up step asks how many rooms you let and names them Room 1, Room 2 and so on. Rename any of them before you continue — “Garden Suite” reads better than “Room 2” to a guest.

Already signed up? Add rooms from Rooms in your portal. Each room counts as a listing on your plan: Starter includes one, Growth three with extras available, and the larger plans ten or more. See pricing for the current numbers.

For each room, fill in the Sleeping section (beds and whether it is en suite) and set Sleeps to the room’s capacity. Your website uses both: the room card shows “Sleeps 2 · 1 king bed · En suite”, and the date search knows which rooms fit a party of three.

Your website: one search, every room

Your Airflow website lists every room on its home page. Choose the Rooms card layout under Website settings → Layout, and the cards show the room name, what it sleeps, its beds, a from-price per night and a See room button. Guesthouses and hotels that sign up as such get this layout from the start.

Put the booking bar in the hero (Website settings → Layout → booking position) and the home page becomes a hotel-style search:

1. The guest picks dates and how many guests.
2. The page checks every room’s calendar, including blocked dates and turnaround days, and says “3 of 6 available for 12 Nov → 15 Nov”.
3. Free rooms move to the front with a Book these dates tag; rooms that are taken, too small, or below the minimum stay are dimmed and say why.
4. Clicking a room opens its booking page with the dates already filled in.

If a guest lands on a room that is taken for their dates, the booking page says so and lists the rooms that are free for those dates, each one a click away.

Rooms can be grouped on the page by tag — tag your rooms “Garden” and “Sea view” and choose By tag under Resource grouping to show them in two sections.

Keeping channels in step

Each room has its own iCal feed and its own booking-email address, which lines up one-to-one with how Booking.com and Airbnb see rooms.

Booking.com lists each room type separately. Connect each Airflow room to the matching room type: import the room’s blocked feed into that room type’s calendar in the extranet, and forward that room type’s booking emails to the room’s Airflow address.

Airbnb lists each room as its own listing. Import the room’s blocked feed into that Airbnb listing’s calendar, and forward its booking emails to the room’s Airflow address.

Two things to know:

• Channels refresh imported feeds on their own schedule, usually every few hours, so a booking taken on your website closes the room on Booking.com or Airbnb at their next refresh, not instantly. See Calendar sync for how feeds work.
• Forwarded booking emails land on the room they were addressed to. If a channel booking arrives on the wrong room, check which Airflow address that room type forwards to.

Seeing the whole house

Your portal’s bookings calendar shows every room as its own lane, so you can see who is in which room tonight and what is free this weekend without opening rooms one at a time. Blocks and turnaround days show on each lane.

Whole house in one season, rooms in another

Some places let the whole house at Christmas and the rooms separately the rest of the year. Airflow handles this with one extra listing for the house:

1. Keep a listing for the house itself, alongside the room listings.
2. On the house’s settings, under Whole house or rooms?, choose The whole house and say what guests book when no season applies: the rooms, or the whole house.
3. On each room’s settings, choose A room of a house and pick the house.
4. Back on the house, add seasons: a label, from and to dates, and whether guests book the whole house or the rooms in that period. Seasons cannot overlap.

On every night, exactly one side is bookable. In a whole-house season the rooms are closed; in a rooms season the house is closed. Your website’s date search says which applies (“Let as a whole house for these dates”), a room’s booking page offers the house when the house is what is open, and the house’s page offers the rooms. A booking that would cross from one season into the other is refused. Each listing’s calendar feed carries the closed nights as “Not available”, so Booking.com and Airbnb close them too.

What this does not do: inside a season there is no link between the house and its rooms, because the other side is closed anyway. Channel bookings that arrive by email for a closed night are still recorded, so keep the channel’s own calendar in step with the feed.

What this model does not do yet

• Room types with a count. “4 Standard rooms, 2 Deluxe” booked by type rather than by name is not supported. If guests book a type and you assign the room later, tell us — it is on the list.

If that is how you run, get in touch before you set up, and we will tell you what works today.