For places you let room by room

What it is for

Most hosts let a whole property and never need this. Rooms exist for the other case: a guesthouse, a house with two bedrooms you let separately, a flat where the spare room goes on Airbnb while you live in the rest.

In those places one property can have several bookings running at once, and the thing that goes wrong is always the same — two guests, one room, one week.

Two names per room

Each room has a name and a nickname, and they do different jobs.

The name is the presentable one. “Double room with balcony.” It is what appears where a room needs naming.

The nickname is what you and your cleaner actually say. “The attic.” “Ana’s old room.” “The one with the blue door.”

Keeping both means you do not have to choose between a name that sounds right and a name your cleaner will recognise at seven in the morning. You get both, and nobody has to translate.

Bookings know their room

When you create or edit a booking you put it in a room. From then on the room travels with it.

If two bookings for the same room have nights that overlap, you get a warning.

A same-day changeover does not count. One guest leaving on the 5th and the next arriving on the 5th is a turnaround, not a double booking, and being warned about it every week would train you to ignore the warning entirely.

For a real overlap it tells you and lets you carry on. It does not block you, because sometimes you know something the calendar does not — you are halfway through a correction, or the two bookings are genuinely the same party. That is what you would want from a colleague rather than from a form.

Where the room shows up

On your bookings list, so a day with three arrivals is legible.

On the cleaning reports. When your cleaner finishes, the clean can be filed against the room it was for. Looking back at last month, you can see which room a photo of a broken blind belongs to.

On your export. The room is one of the columns in the bookings CSV, so whatever you do with that file — accounts, occupancy, a report for a co-owner — can be broken down per room.

What it deliberately does not do

Rooms are an organisational tool, not a channel manager. They do not set different prices per room, do not publish availability anywhere, and do not stop a booking being created.

If you need real multi-room inventory management with rates and availability pushed to booking sites, that is a property management system, and you should buy one. This is for knowing which room a booking is in, and being told when two of them collide.

What this costs

Rooms are part of Pro, along with the cleaner link and the bookings export they work with. If you let one whole property, you will never need to think about them.