Managing vacation rental bookings shouldn’t feel like juggling multiple calendars while crossing your fingers against double bookings. If you’re running a WPRentals site, you’ve got something most WordPress vacation rental themes don’t offer right out of the box: a complete booking engine that actually works.
Here’s what most property managers miss. You don’t need another plugin cluttering up your WordPress install. WPRentals comes packed with everything you need to handle reservations, sync calendars across platforms like Airbnb, and collect payments.
The sstem reliably manages nightly bookings, seasonal pricing, and the tricky changeover-day rules your beach house requires during peak season, giving you peace of mind.
This guide walks you through setting up the WPRentals booking calendar, choosing between instant bookings and approval-based requests, managing availability, and syncing with external platforms.
How WPRentals’ Booking System Works
WPRentals treats booking management as a core feature, not an afterthought. Every property listing comes with an integrated availability calendar that updates in real time as reservations come in. When someone books your mountain cabin for Memorial Day weekend, those dates immediately block out across your calendar.
The calendar sits right on your listing page, where guests can see it. Available dates appear in one color, booked dates in another. No clicking through multiple screens or guessing if that week in July is still open.
What makes this system work well is its ability to adapt to different rental types, such as running vacation rentals. The calendar shows nightly rates and asks guests how many people are staying and whether they are renting equipment by the day. Switch to “Object Rental” mode and the system adjusts to daily bookings without guest count fields.
Property owners get access to a front-end dashboard.No need to log into WordPress admin every time you want to check bookings or block off dates. Everything happens through a clean interface that makes sense even if you’ve never touched WordPress before.
The All-in-One Calendar for Multiple Properties
If you’re managing more than one property, the All-in-One Calendar becomes your command center. This tool displays all your properties’ calendars on a single screen, with color-coded bookings. You can see at a glance which properties have availability gaps and which ones are solidly booked.
Click any date range on any property to block dates for maintenance, add manual bookings, or set custom pricing. If external bookings don’t sync properly, review your integration settings and ensure your API connections are active and correctly configured to keep your calendar consistent across platforms.
Configuring Calendar Display Settings
Before guests can book anything, configure how your calendar looks and behaves. Head to Theme Options and find the Booking Configuration section. Set your date format here: Americans expect MM/DD/YYYY while most of the world uses DD/MM/YYYY. Getting this wrong creates confusion when someone thinks they’re booking for January 5th but actually reserves for May 1st.
The “months ahead” setting determines how far into the future guests can see availability. Most vacation rental sites show 12 months, which covers typical planning windows. You can also customize the colors used to highlight booked dates in version 3.10 and later, allowing you to personalize your calendar’s appearance to suit your brand and preferences.
You’ll also choose whether to display a complete booking form or just a contact form on each listing. The booking form is what you’ll use almost always. Ut lets guests select dates, choose the number of guests, view the total price, and submit their booking. But if you need to pause bookings for maintenance temporarily, you can switch to a simple contact form. This keeps your listing visible while giving you breathing room to sort things out.
Instant Booking vs. Request-to-Book: Making the Right Choice
This decision affects how quickly you can confirm reservations and how much control you keep over who stays at your properties.
How Instant Booking Works
Turn on the “Instant Booking” toggle for a listing, and guests can reserve it immediately, just like booking a hotel room. They select dates, complete payment, and receive instant confirmation removing the wait for your approval.
The process flows like this: Guest finds your listing, picks dates, clicks “Book Now,” logs in or creates an account, pays the deposit through PayPal or Stripe, and gets immediate confirmation. The calendar automatically blocks those dates. Both you and the guest receive confirmation emails.
This approach makes sense when you’ve got properties ready to rent to anyone, your calendar stays up to date, and you want to maximize bookings by reducing friction. According to research by vacation rental managers, instant booking can significantly increase conversion rates by removing uncertainty. Travelers often book the first place that confirms.
Request-to-Book Gives You More Control
Leave instant booking off, and you’re in request mode. Guests pick dates and click to book, but you receive a notification to approve or decline before anything gets confirmed.
You’ll get an email about the new request. Log in to your dashboard, review the booking details, then approve or reject. If you agree, WPRentals generates a payment invoice. The guest is notified that they’ve been approved and need to pay to finalize the booking. Only after payment does the reservation become confirmed.
This extra step works well when you want to vet guests, your property has specific requirements, or you’re managing high-value properties. The tradeoff? Response time becomes critical. Check your notifications at least twice daily and respond within a few hours to maintain control and ensure your guests feel valued and attended to.
Comparing Both Modes
Neither mode is universally better. Many property managers use instant booking during peak season when demand is high, and they can’t afford to lose bookings. During slower periods, they might switch to requests to be more selective. You can even mix strategies across properties and use instant booking for your updated downtown condo and requests for your family farmhouse with personal belongings.
Managing availability requires clear procedures for overlapping bookings. Include steps to resolve conflicts when manual or automatic blocks overlap, ensuring your calendar remains accurate and avoiding double bookings. Keeping your calendar accurate prevents double bookings. WPRentals gives you multiple ways to mark dates as unavailable.
Manual Blocking
Sometimes you need to temporarily remove a property from the market for maintenance, personal use, or deep cleaning. Go to My Listings, edit the property, and find the Calendar Settings section. Click the start date of the period you want to block, then click the end date. Hit “Book Period” and those dates show as unavailable to guests.
The calendar displays these owner-blocked dates differently from regular bookings. If plans change and those dates open up again, head to My Bookings, find your manual block, and delete it. The dates become available instantly.
iCal Integration for External Bookings
Here’s where things get interesting for hosts listing on multiple platforms. You’ve got your property on Airbnb, VRBO, and your own WPRentals site. Someone booked through Airbnb on Monday. Without calendar syncing, your WPRentals site still shows those dates as available.
WPRentals solves this with iCalendar integration. Log in to Airbnb and navigate to your listing’s calendar settings. Find “Export Calendar” and copy the iCal URL. In WPRentals, edit your listing, find the iCal Feed Sync area, paste the Airbnb URL, and save.
WPRentals immediately fetches any bookings from that Airbnb calendar and marks those dates as unavailable on your site. It automatically checks that calendar every three hours for updates. You can add multiple feeds per property: one for Airbnb, another for VRBO, a third for Booking.com. All external bookings are automatically imported into your WPRentals calendar.
Setting Up Pricing That Maximizes Revenue
Smart pricing separates profitable vacation rentals from break-even properties. WPRentals lets you get detailed with rates without needing spreadsheets to track everything.
Base Pricing and Seasonal Rates
Start with your default nightly rate and weekend rate if you charge more for Friday and Saturday nights. WPRentals asks you to define what counts as “weekend” in Theme Options. Beach properties often start weekend pricing on Friday, while mountain cabins might start on Saturday or Sunday.
For seasonal pricing, go to your listing’s calendar, navigate to the month where you want special pricing, then select the date range. A pop-up appears that lets you set custom nightly rates, different minimum-stay requirements, and specific check-in/checkout restrictions for that period.
Example: Your lakeside cabin rents typically for $200/night with a 2-night minimum. For the 4th of July week, you create a custom period at $325/night with a 7-night minimum and Saturday-to-Saturday check-ins only. Anyone searching those dates sees the holiday pricing. On July 7th, pricing automatically reverts to your standard rate.
Long-Stay Discounts and Minimum Stays
Set percentage discounts for stays of 7 nights or more and 30 nights or more in your listing’s price settings. The system automatically applies these when the booking length meets the criteria. A guest booking 10 nights might get 10% off your nightly rate.
Minimum stay requirements protect your bottom line from unprofitable one-night bookings. Your default minimum might be 2 or 3 nights year-round, but during peak summer, you could require 7 nights. The booking calendar enforces these rules automatically, preventing guests from requesting stays shorter than your minimum.
Additional Fees
Beyond nightly rates, you’ll want to set cleaning fees (one-time charge per booking), extra guest fees (when bookings exceed your base guest count), and city or tourist taxes. These are configured in your listing’s price settings and automatically add to the total cost displayed to guests.
Setting Up Payment Processing
WPRentals includes three payment options without installing extra plugins: PayPal, Stripe, and direct bank transfer. PayPal remains popular because guests trust it. Stripe processes credit cards directly on your site without redirecting guests away. Direct bank transfer is available for guests who want to pay by wire, though you must manually mark bookings as paid once you confirm receipt of funds.
Why You Should Enable WooCommerce Integration
Here’s a recommendation worth following: install WooCommerce and enable WPRentals’ WooCommerce integration mode. This doesn’t replace the booking system since WooCommerce only handles payments while WPRentals still manages all the booking logic and calendar.
The benefits are significant:
- More payment gateways: WooCommerce supports hundreds of processors. Need Apple Pay, Alipay, or local European payment methods? Available through WooCommerce extensions.
- Guest checkout without mandatory registration: Native WPRentals requires guests to create accounts before booking. With WooCommerce, guests can check out first, and WooCommerce automatically creates their account.
- Coupons and discount codes: Offer promotional codes for repeat guests or shoulder season specials.
Setup is straightforward according to WPRentals support documentation. Install WooCommerce (the free version works fine), then enable the WooCommerce payment mode in WPRentals Theme Options. When a guest clicks “Book Now,” they are redirected to a WooCommerce checkout page. After payment, WPRentals receives confirmation and marks the booking complete.
Syncing Calendars Across Multiple Platforms
If you list on several platforms to maximize exposure, calendar synchronization becomes essential.
Importing External Bookings
When someone books your Airbnb listing, you need those dates blocked on your WPRentals site. Log in to Airbnb and find your listing’s calendar settings. Copy the export URL. Back in WPRentals, edit your property listing, see the iCal Feed Sync section, paste the Airbnb URL, and save.
WPRentals immediately imports existing Airbnb bookings and checks that feed every three hours for updates. Repeat this process for every platform where you list the property. These imported bookings appear in a special color on your owner calendar, helping you distinguish between bookings made on your site and those made on external platforms.
Important technical notes from WPRentals documentation: Your site needs SSL (https), listings must be published, and you need at least one actual booking on your WPRentals site before iCal starts syncing properly.
Exporting Your Calendar to Other Sites
When someone books through your WPRentals site, you need to block those dates on Airbnb and VRBO. Create a special page in WordPress using the “ICAL FEED” template. This activates the export system and gives each listing a unique iCal export URL.
Find this URL by editing a listing and looking in the Calendar section. Copy it, then head to Airbnb and find “Import Calendar” in your listing’s calendar settings. Paste your WPRentals iCal URL. Airbnb will start checking your feed and blocking those dates on their end. Do the same on VRBO and Booking.com.
Most platforms check iCal feeds every 2-6 hours. This creates a small window where double bookings remain possible, but it’s far better than manual updates.
Minimizing Double-Booking Risk
Even with iCal sync running, a small risk remains because of refresh delays:
- Respond quickly to booking requests instead of letting them sit for hours
- Check manually after external bookings to verify they synced
- Don’t allow same-day or next-day bookings if you’re juggling multiple platforms
- Test your sync setup with fake bookings before going live
According to vacation rental management companies, proper calendar synchronization eliminates over 95% of double-bookings. Rare failures usually occur when someone books on one platform just seconds before another platform’s sync refreshes.
Testing Before You Launch
Before accepting real bookings, spend an hour testing everything. Create a test listing if you’re not ready to use fundamental properties yet. Try booking as a guest using a different browser, register as a new user, select dates, and go through the entire process.
Check that the calendar displays correctly, booked dates show as unavailable, pricing calculations include all fees, minimum stay requirements work, seasonal pricing applies correctly, confirmation emails are sent properly, and bookings appear in your dashboard. Test your iCal sync by creating a manual booking and checking if it appears in external calendars.
Find and fix problems now, not when your first confirmed guest tries to book.
