Not every unit is let for a year. More and more of our property customers keep a few apartments or villas for short stays — a week through Airbnb, three nights through Booking.com, a long weekend booked by an agent. Until now that business lived in a spreadsheet and five portal calendars, and the money reached the books whenever somebody got round to it.
This release brings it into the Real Estate module as Holiday Homes: a back office for units let by the night, with its own phone app, calendars kept in step with the portals, and every stay posted to Accounts.
One Switch on the Property
A property is now set to Tenancy contracts or Holiday homes. The two never mix: a holiday-homes building does not appear on tenancy contracts or in rent invoicing, and its units carry a rate per night instead of a monthly rent. Ritzy will not switch a property while it still has live contracts or open bookings, so nothing is stranded on the wrong side.
Every Booking, Wherever It Came From
Bookings come from Airbnb, Booking.com, Trip.com, Agoda and Trivago, from agents and by referral, or from somebody who walks in. Each channel carries its own commission and says whether it collects the guest’s money and pays you out. A booking records the guest, the nights, the rate (or the portal’s own total, when it isn’t simply rate times nights) and the portal’s confirmation number — which can’t be entered twice, so a booking keyed in by two people is caught.
Overlapping dates are refused, and two people saving a booking for the same unit at the same moment queue rather than both getting through.
Calendars That Keep Themselves in Step
The portals already sync calendars with one another using iCal: each publishes an export address for a listing and can import addresses from elsewhere. Ritzy now sits in the middle of that:
- Ritzy → portal. Every unit gets its own calendar address for each portal to import. The portal then blocks every night Ritzy holds — including the other portals’ reservations. The address lists dates only, as “Not available”: no guest names, prices or booking numbers leave your system.
- Portal → Ritzy. Paste the portal’s own export address for the unit, and Ritzy reads it every half hour. A new reservation becomes a booking; a changed one moves; a cancelled one is cancelled.
So an Airbnb reservation arrives in Ritzy, leaves again in Ritzy’s calendar, and Booking.com blocks those nights — and the other way round, for every portal you list on.
We were careful about the edges. A calendar carries dates, not guests or prices, so a booking read from a portal is marked Complete for the manager to fill in from the booking notification — and if they had already keyed it in by hand, Ritzy matches it instead of creating a second one. A reservation that vanishes from a portal is only cancelled automatically if the guest hasn’t arrived and no money has been taken. And a genuine double booking — two portals selling the same night before either calendar caught up — is never quietly resolved: it is put in front of the manager with both bookings named.
For a portal that doesn’t sync, there is still a checklist: when a booking comes in, Ritzy lists every other portal where those dates have to be blocked, and reopened again if it is cancelled. A portal that reads its Ritzy calendar drops off that list by itself.
Check-In, Check-Out, and the Books
Check a guest in and record their ID at the door. Check them out and the invoice posts to Accounts — rent, extras such as cleaning, and tax — with the channel’s commission posted as a bill from the channel. Payments are receipts, held on account until the invoice exists and allocated to it at check-out.
When a portal collects the money, the invoice and the commission land on the portal’s own account, so what is left there is exactly the payout you are owed. When the guest pays you, the commission is simply a bill to pay. Every posting carries the property as its department and the unit as its job, so holiday income sits beside rent in the same reports.
A monthly summary shows occupancy, nights sold, average nightly rate and revenue per available night, by unit and by channel.
What Each Home Costs to Run
A stay is only half the picture. Every turnover brings a cleaner, a load of laundry and a restock of guest supplies, and every few months something breaks. Those costs can now be entered against the unit they were for — or against the whole building when they are shared, such as the pool or a pest treatment — under categories you set up once: cleaning, laundry and linen, repairs and maintenance, guest supplies, utilities.
Each cost posts to Accounts the moment it is saved. Paid on the spot, it is a payment from the cash or bank account it came out of; a supplier’s invoice becomes a bill to pay later, like any other. Tax on the bill is handled, the property and the unit travel with it as department and job, and a photo of the bill is attached to the voucher so the accountant sees it too. The clean after a stay is added from the booking itself.
On the phone it takes seconds at the door: open the stay, tap Add the cleaning cost, type the amount, take a photo of the bill, save. Each home’s Costs tab shows what it cost to keep this month.
The monthly summary then answers the question owners actually ask: not just what each home took in, but what it earned — revenue less the portal’s commission and its own running costs, unit by unit, with the shared costs of each building and a breakdown by category.
The same report is on the phone, in the app’s new Costs tab: step through the months, see what was spent and what the homes earned, then costs by category and by home. Tap a category or a home to see the costs behind the figure, and Share this report sends the month’s numbers as a message — straight to an owner on WhatsApp or by email, without opening a spreadsheet.
Ritzy Holiday Homes, on the Phone
The manager’s app shows the day: who arrives, who leaves and who is staying, the portal checklist, and the bookings still to complete. A week calendar per unit answers “is 3B free this weekend” on the stairs, and Find free lists every unit available for a guest’s dates. Check-in, check-out, payments and costs work from the phone exactly as they do at the desk.
The new Homes tab is each unit’s brochure: its photos (the unit’s own, then the building’s), its videos, and the details a guest asks about — bedrooms, bathrooms, size, floor, furnishing, the building’s facilities and the unit’s amenities. Photos can be taken and added from the phone.
Calendar sync can be set up from the phone too, which is usually where the link is. Open a home and choose Sync: share Ritzy’s address for that home straight into the Airbnb or Booking.com app, then copy the portal’s own calendar link from its app, paste it back and save — Ritzy reads it on the spot and shows what changed. Each portal’s card says when it last read Ritzy and when Ritzy last read it, with any double booking spelled out, and one tap reads every portal calendar now instead of waiting for the next half-hourly read.
Videos in Every Gallery
Property galleries now hold videos as well as photos — a YouTube or Vimeo walk-through, a Google Drive clip or a Matterport virtual tour. Ritzy keeps the link rather than the file, so your database and backups stay small, and the share links you send prospects now carry the videos too, playing on the page. A holiday home shared that way shows its price per night.
How You Get It
Holiday Homes comes with the Real Estate module. Set a property to holiday homes, give its units a nightly rate, and the screen, the phone app, calendar sync and expenses are there. Calendar sync needs Ritzy to be reachable from the internet over HTTPS, because the portals fetch the calendar from their own servers.
If you let apartments or villas by the night and want to see this working on your own units, get in touch.