The holiday-home owners I talk to already sell their nights through Booking.com or Airbnb. A booking system of their own does not replace the platforms: it has to work alongside them. Below are the five jobs it has to do, and how two sites I built do them: roziunamas.lt, a holiday home in Karklė, and teatro.lt, an apartment in Klaipėda’s Old Town.
1. Never sell the same night twice
Booking.com and Airbnb link calendars with other platforms through iCal links: each side publishes its booked or closed dates, and the other reads them. Not straight away. Booking.com imports a connected calendar every two hours, and Airbnb updates one every three. Booking.com itself says the sync is not real time and can lead to double bookings, though rarely. Calendar sync is also not open to everyone on Booking.com: the property must have 20 room types or fewer, one unit of each, and no channel manager.
So the system has to:
- publish its own calendar for each platform;
- read the platforms’ calendars as often as it can;
- check the dates again at the moment the payment is confirmed, and tell you at once if the night is already taken.
Rožių namas publishes a separate calendar for each platform: it holds the direct bookings, the nights the owner closed, the paid sauna days and the nights sold through the other platform. Airbnb says it blocks nights booked elsewhere automatically, but nights merely closed elsewhere may or may not be blocked. The site reads both platforms’ calendars every 15 minutes, and a failed read does not reopen nights already closed. Rožių namas (and teatro.lt, when online payment is on) holds a night only once the payment is confirmed, and checks the dates again then. If a platform has sold that night in the meantime, the guest has already paid: the owner gets an e-mail and refunds the money or offers other dates by hand.
That lowers the risk but does not remove it: until a platform has read your calendar, it can sell a night you have just sold yourself. If you have many channels, or double bookings keep happening, a channel manager links the calendars instead; what that looks like is on the Beds24 page.
2. Confirm only once the money is in
When a guest pays online, the booking is confirmed not when they press the button but when the payment provider reports that the money has arrived. If that report is late, every hour the site asks the payment provider itself and confirms bookings that are paid but not yet confirmed. At Rožių namas the guest pays the whole amount by card when booking; the first real booking was paid on 2 October 2026.
Paying online does not have to be compulsory. teatro.lt has it switched off for now: a guest sends a request, and the booking is confirmed by phone or e-mail. It is one setting in the admin, switched on or off without a developer.
3. Show the whole price and the terms before payment
Before a distance contract is made, the consumer has to be told the total price including taxes. Explaining its Airbnb case, the European Commission wrote: “Under EU consumer law, a price quote must include all fixed charges and taxes.” In 2019 Airbnb began showing, from the outset, the total price with all mandatory charges, cleaning fees among them. So a cleaning fee, if you charge one, is safest included in the price the guest sees first. Rožių namas prices each night by the seasons the owner sets, can give a discount on longer stays, and shows the guest the whole price before payment.
The same goes for the terms. The 14-day right to withdraw from a distance contract does not apply to accommodation for a specific date or period, and the guest has to be told so before the contract is made. So what happens on a cancellation has to be written clearly in your terms, and the guest has to see them before paying. On both sites the guest ticks a box to accept the terms before paying online. Rožių namas’s terms are strict: bookings are final, money is not refunded, and the 14-day right does not apply. Whether the same suits you is your decision; if in doubt, ask a lawyer.
4. Tell you on your phone
The owner is often not at the property, so the admin has to work from a phone. Both sites have an admin that installs on a phone like an app, and a separate Android app. From it the owner closes dates, changes prices and sees bookings. A new paid booking arrives as a phone alert straight away: the sum in the title, the dates in the text. A teatro.lt request arrives by e-mail, and the phone alerts the owner to new mail too.
The site writes to guests by itself: Rožių namas sends a guest who booked at least two weeks ahead a reminder a week before arrival, and asks for a review after the stay.
5. Sell more than the night
A holiday home often has a sauna or a hot tub. At Rožių namas the sauna is booked by the hour and paid by card. The house is let whole, so a paid sauna closes that night’s stay, and a stay closes the sauna only for the hours the house is taken. A system that can only sell nights cannot do that.
What the system will not do for you
Since 1 January 2025, accommodation providers in Lithuania must register their guests in the state’s e.turistas system. Lithuania’s consumer rights authority lists data you may ask guests for, among them: name and surname, date of birth, the country that issued their identity document, and the arrival and departure dates. Neither Rožių namas nor teatro.lt registers guests in e.turistas. A booking already holds some of that data, but registering guests stays your job.
How such a site works and what it costs is on the Bookings page.