If you share a property, it's helpful to have a tool to schedule and manage use. Some considerations include:
- Privacy: only the group members should be able to see the availability calendar, it should not be publicly available.
- Efficiency: rather than calling or emailing a person to book use, co-owners/group members should be able to reserve use online.
- Control: a manager, or a board member or facility manager should be able to make changes to any reservation, add members and change settings. You might also want to set some people to view-only.
- Customization: set up standard booking options. Make it reservable by night or day part or hour time slot according to how you use the property.
- Communication: share property information and rules for scheduling use in the same place.
- Reporting: keep track of how much use is booked so you can share expenses fairly.
The free option: Google Calendar (G Suite edition costs $6/user/month for the cheapest subscription)
Google Calendar is a well-known and free (with some feature limitations) but it does have drawbacks for groups sharing property:
- If you want to add others to your calendar who can add 'events' you have to give them full access permissions. Those people then have the power to edit any event in the calendar (not just their own), share the calendar with anyone they want to, and even delete the whole calendar.
- 'Important: Use caution when sharing your calendar and choose what others can access. Anyone with full access permissions to your calendar will be able to:
- respond to invitations
- create and edit events
- share your calendar with others
- receive emails about changes to your calendar
- delete your calendar' https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37082#zippy=%2Cunderstand-permission-settings-for-shared-calendars
- 'Important: Use caution when sharing your calendar and choose what others can access. Anyone with full access permissions to your calendar will be able to:
- If you want to share the calendar with anyone that doesn't have a Google account then you have to make the calendar public.
- 'Tip: The only way to let people who don’t have Google Calendar view your calendar is to make it public. Learn more about sharing publicly.'
- Anyone with access to your shared Google Calendar can create entirely custom events from 5 minutes long to several days. There's no way to standardize bookings so that users can only select nights or half days or hour-long time slots.
- If you want to create a use report you are going to have to manually count up all the events for a time period.
To gain more control over a Google Calendar you can sign up for G Suite. That starts at $6/user/month. So for a shared family vacation home with 4 users that's $24/month or $288/year.
A Paid Option: Resercal, starting at $199/year
The app we built - Resercal - is designed specifically for anyone sharing use of a co-owned or group-rented property such as a vacation home owned by multiple siblings or cousins, or a summer cottage rented by a group of friends.
We started out by trying to use Google Calendar to efficiently schedule use of a shared vacation property, but we ran into the issues and limitations noted above.
Our next step was to try setting up a WordPress site and use some of the booking plugins available there. This turned out to be difficult to manage, expensive and lacking the features we needed. Plus, with a WordPress site you have to either set up the domain registration, hosting and website yourself or pay someone to do it. Over the years we demoed 10-20 different paid plugins but none of them worked for our private group sharing situation.
Eventually we decided to design and build our own app that would address those issues and make life easier for other sharing groups.
Resercal costs less than G Suite for a comparable number of users, addresses the problems we encountered with Google Calendar, and includes a range of features designed to make sharing use of a property stress-free and sustainable for the long-term.
Account set up is taken care of for you and there's no need to manage website hosting or registration.
Resercal is a totally private app that enables you to:
- Log in to see the availability calendar and make reservations.
- Add 'Members' to the app at any time.
- Decide who should be a Manager (can edit everything), a Member (can edit their own reservations), or a Non-Reserving Member (can only see the availability calendar).
- Set up standardized reservation options: most use Nights for overnight stays, but we have beach houses with 'Day 10am-4pm' and 'Night 4pm-10am' and pools with 1 or 2 hour bookable time slots. We also allow day parts to be 'Private' (exclusive use) or 'Family' (other family/group members can join).
- Publish and edit rules that Members agree to abide by, and that are always available for reference in the app.
- Share and edit property information on a dedicated Information page.
- Temporarily suspend any Member. A way to penalize a group member without resorting to fines or lawyers. When suspended, a Member can't see the calendar or make reservations. As soon as the situation is resolved, the Member can be re-instated with one click.
- Activate waitlisting so Members can add themselves to the waitlist for an already-reserved date or time.
- Allow for tentative reservations that Members or Managers can confirm as needed.
- Book multiple 'Reservables' so you can have reservations for using 'Main House' and for 'Guest House', or for rooms, cabins or vehicles.
- Prevent Members from changing bookings that have already happened - past events cannot be edited or deleted except by Managers.
- Record and easily get information on Member use via the Annual Use Report page.
We think that Google Calendar is an excellent free tool for small group situations where privacy isn't essential, where it's ok for everyone to have Manager-level powers, and when recording use isn't important.
WordPress + premium plugins works well for commercial ventures but lacks features for private groups and can be very complicated to set up and maintain.
We built Resercal to be a better solution for property-sharing groups that value privacy and also want a simple set up with no maintenance required.
If you are interested in finding out more about Resercal please contact us to arrange a demo and free trial.