A Guest House Site Whose Calendar Shows No Rooms

The site

A five-room guest house in a restored Edwardian home, a few streets from the harbour in a small coastal town. The three-year-old website is pleasant: large photographs, a page for each room, breakfast described in loving detail.

Every room page has an availability calendar, and the home page invites guests to book direct for the best rate.

Open any calendar and every night for the next twelve months is shaded as booked. Every room, every month, including the quiet weeks of November.

The guest house is not full. On most weeknights this month, three or four of its rooms are empty.

The inference a visitor makes

A visitor planning a weekend away finds the site, likes the rooms, and opens the calendar to check their dates. Fully booked.

They try the next weekend, and the one after. The conclusion is reasonable: a popular place, unavailable, so try somewhere else.

Some look the guest house up on a booking site and find rooms there, where every reservation costs the owners a commission. Others book a different guest house altogether.

A few conclude that the place has closed and nobody took the website down. Almost none phone to ask, because the calendar has already answered.

Where the calendar gets its dates

The calendar knows nothing by itself. It is a plugin that collects availability from elsewhere and paints it onto the page.

• The guest house's own reservations, kept in its back office system.
• A calendar link from each booking site, listing the nights sold there.
• A scheduled task that fetches those links every few hours.
• A setting deciding what to show when a link cannot be read.
• The plugin itself, updated or not along with the rest of the site.

The fourth is the one that turned a broken link into a closed guest house. The plugin had been set to treat any calendar it could not read as fully booked.

A calendar that fails closed

That setting was chosen for a sensible reason. If a sync fails, showing nights as free risks two guests booking the same room, and a double booking is a miserable phone call.

So when one booking site's link stopped working in the spring, the plugin did as it was told: unable to confirm that any night was free, it showed none.

The link had died because the owners re-created their listing on that site after renaming the rooms, and the new listing came with a new calendar address. Nobody told the website.

A safe failure for the back office became the worst possible failure for the front door.

Nobody looks at the calendar

The owners manage bookings in the back office system, where availability is correct. They have no reason to open their own website's calendar, and every reason to assume it matches.

The plugin wrote an error to a log on the server each time the link failed. Nobody reads that log, and the plugin sent no email.

The only people who saw the calendar were strangers deciding whether to stay, and none of them could tell it was wrong.

Book direct, but not here

The home page asks guests to book direct for the best rate, the right message for a guest house paying commission on every reservation made through a booking site.

The calendar then sends those same guests away, and for many of them away means a booking site.

The owners had noticed direct bookings drying up over the summer. They put it down to the booking sites advertising more heavily, which made sense, and nobody connected it with their own website.

No way to ask

Below each calendar is a Book button, and nothing else. The phone number sits in the footer in small type, and the email address is on a separate contact page.

A visitor who suspects the calendar is wrong, or who would happily move their dates by a night, has no prompt to ask.

A line beside the calendar inviting guests to check dates by phone or email would have rescued some of them, even with the sync broken.

A worked example

It came to light at breakfast. A guest who had booked by phone mentioned, kindly, that the website showed the house full for the whole year, and that she had nearly not called.

The web company that maintains the site found the failing link in an afternoon, and the error log showed it had been failing since April.

The calendar now reads the new address, and if any link has not been read for a day, it hides itself and shows the phone number and email instead, asking guests to check dates directly.

The plugin now emails both owners when a sync fails, and the phone number sits beside every calendar.

On the first of each month, one of the owners compares two room pages with the back office on a phone, and checks that each Book button still reaches the right room.

The checks that would have caught it

Any one of these would have found the problem within weeks rather than six months.

A weekly look at two or three room pages on a phone, compared with the back office. Five minutes, and the only check that sees what guests see.

An alert when a sync fails. Most calendar plugins can send one; few are set up to.

A monthly glance in Analytics at visits to the room pages against direct bookings. Visits held steady through the summer while bookings from the site dwindled.

The counter-case within the site

A live calendar is not always the right tool for a guest house of this size.

With five rooms and many returning guests, a clear Check availability button that opens the booking system directly, or a short form asking for dates, can serve as well with less to break.

Where a calendar earns its place, in busy seasons, it needs somebody who checks it and a fallback for when its data is stale.

Either way, the site should never say the house is full unless somebody knows that it is.

What to change

1. Compare the website calendar with your own records today.
2. Update every booking site's calendar link in the plugin.
3. Show contact details when calendar data is stale.
4. Turn on email alerts for failed syncs.
5. Put the phone number beside every calendar.
6. Check two room pages on a phone weekly.
7. Watch room page visits against direct bookings monthly.

Step three is the fix that survives the next failure. Syncs will fail again, for reasons nobody can predict, and a calendar that admits it does not know costs a phone call instead of a guest.

Booking routes that contradict each other are the subject of a physiotherapy site with three booking routes.

Frequently asked questions

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