Properties and their calendars

A property is a villa, an apartment, a penthouse or a yacht that you manage or rent out. Its record brings together its photos, its details, its owner, its technical contacts, its access codes (encrypted) and its Airbnb, Booking.com or Vrbo calendars.

Who has access:

Where: Catalogue › Properties in the sidebar.

10.1 The property list#

A table, one line per property: a thumbnail of the cover photo, Property, City, Type (Villa, Apartment, Penthouse, Yacht, Other), Access codes (“Set up”), Bedrooms, Capacity. Search by name or city; Active or Archived properties. “…” menu: Import (managers and the owner).

New property: the Property name, the Type and the City are enough to get started; photos, amenities and codes are completed on the record.

10.2 A property's record#

Header: name, Edit, and the “…” menu: Archive property (it leaves the list and the stay choices; its photos, codes and history stay intact) or Restore property.

The gallery at the top of the record: the photos, the first one serving as the cover.

Main column:

• Details (what the team and the assistant know about the place): Type, Bedrooms, Bathrooms, Capacity, Amenities (as tags: heated pool, gym, jacuzzi), Description (the text the assistant can reuse to present the property), Particulars for the team only (“the living room air conditioning switches off at 10 pm”, “gate slow to open”).
• Address and time zone: street, postcode, city, region, country, Directions (“green gate after the roundabout”; never a code here, codes have their own safe), Time zone (a service “at the villa” is read in this time zone; by default, the concierge service's own).
• Owner: name, phone, email. Never shared with clients. With Pro and Network, the Send the owner the report every month box sends the report for the past month to the owner's email by itself, on the 1st of the month (“Monthly report: Sent on the 1st of each month” on the record). It requires the owner's email; removing the email turns the sending off. Details in chapter 11, section 11.7.
• Technical contacts: pool technician, gardener, electrician, each with their role, name, phone and email. Who to call when something goes wrong.
• Calendars (10.4).

Right-hand column:

• Access codes (10.3).
• Linked services: the villa rental, its regular chef, its cleaning, attached from the catalogue; View in the catalogue.

Edit opens a drawer with the whole form; only the fields you change are saved.

Good to know about the assistant. The assistant reads the record of each active property: its name, its city, its type, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, the capacity, the amenities and the description. It uses them to answer “how many bedrooms?” or “is the pool heated?”, with the words of the description, adding nothing. For a client who is staying, the property of their stay comes first. It never reads the access codes, the directions, the exact address, the owner, the technical contacts or the particulars, which stay with the team.

The record describes the property; it says neither whether it is free nor how much it costs. The price and the dates go through the rental service attached to the property in the catalogue (chapter 8), and a request for dates always follows the usual route: the assistant looks, the team checks.

10.3 Access codes#

Gate, Door, Alarm, Safe, Wi-Fi network, Wi-Fi password, Notes.

• The codes are encrypted at rest in the database. Every view and every change is recorded.
• The block is locked by default. Show displays them for 60 seconds, then they hide themselves. Copy next to each one. They are never kept in memory on the device.
• Edit first reads the current codes again (a read that is also recorded), so that nothing is erased by mistake. Clear all empties the safe.
• Who: the “access codes” permission (owner, managers, concierges). The field team only sees them from their assignments, on each day the assignment covers (chapter 6). Accounting does not see them.

The assistant does not know the codes. If it is asked for them, it acknowledges the request and asks the concierge a priority question. It does not even know when or how you pass them on: this is intentional.

Each read appears in Settings › Privacy › Access log (“Access codes viewed”).

10.4 Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo calendars#

Pro and Network feature (calendar sync). On Essential, what already exists stays readable and can be removed, but nothing can be added or synced.

If a property is also rented out on other platforms, the dates booked there must block yours, and the other way round. Vetexis does this in both directions, using the standard iCal format.

Importing dates from a platform#

1. On the platform, copy the “Export calendar” address. On Airbnb: Calendar › Availability › Connect calendars › Export calendar. On Booking.com: Rates & availability › Sync calendars.
2. On the property's record, Calendars section, Add a calendar: a Name (“Airbnb”) and the Calendar address (iCal).
3. Add and sync: the first read happens straight away.

After that, Vetexis reads each calendar again every 30 minutes, and on request with Sync. Each read replaces the dates of that calendar with those in the file: a booking cancelled on Airbnb disappears, a booking that has moved moves, nothing is duplicated. Stays entered by hand are never touched. At most ten calendars per property.

What you see:

• a timeline of the next eight weeks: booked days in grey, overlaps in red, today marked;
• overlaps with a stay entered in Vetexis or a villa booking, for the team to settle (“Van Dijk family (stay entered here, 3 → 10 August) overlaps Airbnb (5 → 8 August).”), with View record;
• each calendar and the status of its last sync, stated calmly: “Synced 12 min ago · 4 booked periods”, or “Last sync 2 hours ago, failed: address unreachable.”;
• the Next booked dates.

A calendar's “…” menu offers Pause (its dates no longer count), Resume and Remove calendar (its dates disappear from the schedule).

If it fails repeatedly (three times in a row, that is an hour and a half), an alert goes to the team on WhatsApp once, until the next success.

No guest name is kept: the platforms' iCal files are only used to know which days are taken.

What imported dates change#

• On the schedule, they appear as grey bars “Villa Azur · Booked on Airbnb”, distinct from your bookings (chapter 6).
• For the assistant, a service attached to this property is unavailable on those days: it does not offer it.

Exporting your dates to the platforms#

Feed for your platforms section (managers and the owner): Create address, then Copy and paste it into Airbnb, Booking.com or your property management software. The stays and bookings entered in Vetexis will block the dates there, without any name. The feed covers the past 90 days and the next two years.

New address replaces the current address (the old one stops working at once: paste the new one everywhere); Turn off feed stops the sending.

The entry point in Settings#

Settings › Calendars separates two kinds of calendars that should not be confused:

• Property calendars: the list of your properties, each leading to its record, where import and export are set up;
• My calendar: each person's assignments in their phone's calendar (chapter 6), which each member connects for themselves.

10.5 Examples#

A villa rented out on three channels. Villa Azur is on Airbnb, on Booking.com and booked directly through the concierge service. Sofia adds the two calendars to the record, creates the outgoing feed and pastes it into Airbnb and Booking.com. When a WhatsApp client asks for the villa from 5 to 8 August, already booked on Airbnb, the assistant knows the villa rental is unavailable on those days and suggests something else. When Sofia confirms a direct stay from the 12th to the 19th, Airbnb and Booking.com block those dates the next time they read the feed.

The gate code. On the day the Van Dijks arrive, Ana (cleaning) has an assignment at the villa at 10 am: she sees the gate code from her assignment, for 60 seconds. The next day, she no longer sees it. Sofia can check in the access log who viewed the codes and when.