Villa, ski chalet or cottage rental

These style of products tend to have flexible dates (i.e. use freesale tours) but don't wish other customers to book at the same time, for the same accommodation unit. Use for villas, cottages, ski chalets, apartments, yacht charter, hunting lodges etc...

The basics

Setup each individual villa / ski chalet / cottage as a tour
Select the Price x 1 rule on the money tab (tour setup) (This makes the pricing per villa / ski chalet, rather than per person)
Select the NO booking overlap rule (tour setup). This stops more than one booking being valid for a villa for any one date
Select a price rule (or leave as default: [A] Start date in season
On the freesale tab leave the duration rule at Quantity.... use the duration multiplier table instead
Add a tour season (freesale) at the appropriate rate

Overlapping bookings
The no overlap bookings setting is as follows:

No - but same day OK (e.g. Booking#1 ends 5th, Booking#2 can start on 5th)
No - but next day OK (e.g. Booking#1 ends 5th, Booking#2 can start on 6th)

The decision depends upon how you organise your cleaning / handovers.

Bookings that overlap with other bookings for the same villa will create a warning message. These warning messages appear:

At the top of the actual booking - including details about which booking overlaps
On a tab called Freesale issues on the bookings overview page (from where you start your booking search etc). This tab only shows if you do have issues!
On the villa / ski chalet report (from the reports section)

Overlapping booking warnings are only recalculated every 5 minutes so if you change a booking (by adjusting a date) the alerts may still show for that booking for a few minutes.

In the staff booking process you can overlap bookings in the same villa at the same time (but you will know there is an overlapping booking). Customers can't overlap bookings on the web booking engine.

Price rules
Generally leave the price rule at [A] - Start date in season.
The other rules [C] - Start date / end date average - are useful when you have big seasonal changes in price - and want to handle situations where someone books a villa for 1 week in at one season price and a 2nd week at another.

Duration pricing
On the tour setup page you can see a duration multiplier table. Use this to calculate that a two week booking should be twice what a 1 week booking is (set 1-7 as x1, 8-14 as x2)

The duration multiplier table can also be used to exclude certain durations.

There are alternatives to using the duration pricing table - e.g. rule [E] price by duration - please see the Configuration & Setup manual for further details on this method.

Selling Saturday to Saturday
Tick to force dates to only start on Saturday and only end on Saturday.
Or tick to only start on Saturday and only permit 7, 14 and 21 night durations!

Reports
There are three main reports that you will find helpful:

In resort - by date - who is currently with you
Arrivals - by date - who is arriving on a particular date
Villa / Ski chalet report - showing bookings by date and listing any overlapping bookings that need to be resolved. You can also access this chart from that report

Right click on the chart (in the report) to save the image. That way you can print out a nice wall chart of forthcoming bookings (and remaining availability)

Fixed prices by a fixed week
One alternative can be to load freesale seasons as follows:

Monday - start / end date the same - THE PRICE
Tuesday to Sunday - 0 price
Monday - start / end date the same - THE PRICE
Tuesday to Sunday - 0 price

Then select rule [E] price by duration. This method works best where you publish fixed prices by the week. It may be worth condsidering in situations where different weeks have known, fixed, prices.

Selling by the room
If you sell by the room (e.g. a large ski chalet) you will probably prefer to use the hotel functionality rather than this villa functionality. You can set up prices by the room as well as an entire chalet price (for booking the entire building)

See also

Hotel setup guide - setup as a hotel if you are looking to control inventory / availability on a room by room basis