Blocking your dates everywhere in one go: family, building work, direct sales

What you need

• The complete list of your platforms, including the small ones: personal website, regional platform, tourist office.
• The credentials for each account, checked recently, not the logins from two years ago.
• Five minutes per platform for the manual method, or a central calendar already connected for the automatic one.

Blocking dates is the most repeated act in a host's life. The three classic occasions: family or friends coming to stay, building work, and the high season you keep for direct sales, with no commission. The difficulty is not technical. The real danger is forgetting: the fourth platform, the one nobody ever opens, which carries on selling the dates of your own holiday.

Method 1: by hand, platform by platform

Step 1: write the list before you start

Take a sheet of paper or a note on your phone, and list every place where your property can be booked. Every platform, your personal website if it takes bookings, the local directory. That list will serve for every future block: the mind forgets, the list does not.

Step 2: block the period on each platform

On Airbnb, open the listing calendar, select the dates, choose "Blocked". On Booking, open the extranet calendar and close the dates to sale. On Abritel, book the period for yourself or mark it unavailable. Each platform has its own vocabulary, but the action is the same everywhere: select the dates, close them. Tick each line of your list as you go.

Step 3: read it again the next day

The next day, open each calendar on the traveller side, as if you wanted to book. The dates must show as unavailable everywhere. That second reading takes five minutes and catches the oversight before a guest finds it.

This method works, but it has a hidden cost: it has to be done again in full for every block, and its reliability rests on your discipline on a tired evening. With 4 platforms and ten or so blocks a year, that makes 40 chances to miss a box.

Method 2: block in one place, and let the outputs spread it

The second method calls for a connection to be made first, then removes the repetitive action. The principle: a central calendar gathers all your bookings, and each platform reads an output of that calendar through a calendar link. The connection is the same as the one used to link your platforms to one another, and it is explained step by step in how to sync Airbnb and Booking. A Google calendar can play that central role as a stopgap, but it sends the same calendar to everybody and nobody warns you the day it freezes. A central calendar built for holiday lets produces an output suited to each platform, one that never sends a platform back its own bookings.

Once that set-up is in place, blocking becomes a single action: you place the blocked period in the central calendar, once. The block appears at once in every output. Forgetting a platform is impossible, since you open none of them.

Let us be precise about the pace, because that is the honest limit of this method: the date is blocked with us straight away, and visible on each platform at its next re-reading. Platforms re-read calendar links in cycles: Booking announces a re-reading every 2 hours, Airbnb an update every 3 hours (official help pages, consulted in August 2026), and some diaries, Google first among them, can wait a whole day. The detailed figures are in our guide to iCal sync delays platform by platform. For a block placed three weeks ahead, that delay changes nothing. For a last-minute block on dates in high demand, it counts, and the next section tells you what to do.

The traps

Believing that a block placed on one platform spreads on its own. A block placed on Airbnb only closes the dates elsewhere if the other platforms import the Airbnb calendar. If your connections are incomplete, or one-way, the block stays local and the other platforms carry on selling.

The last-minute block. Between the moment you block and the next re-reading by each platform, the dates remain on sale. For a period in high demand that is decided within hours, do both: block in the central calendar, then also close by hand on your one or two busiest platforms. Double blocking causes no problem at all, it is the same dates closed twice. That scenario is set out in the guide to direct bookings, where racing the clock is the rule.

Forgetting to unblock. The building work finishes a fortnight early, and the dates stay closed. Nobody will alert you to a date blocked for nothing: it is a silent loss of income. Note the end date of every block, and reopen as soon as it has passed.

Blocking on the wrong property. With several properties, a block placed on the wrong calendar closes the property that is let and leaves open the one with the builders in it. Read the property name again before confirming.

Staying calm

Spreading a block solves the forgetting, but two things still have to be known at all times: has each platform actually re-read the calendar, and has a booking slipped onto the period before that re-reading? That is exactly the role of calendar monitoring. The health dashboard shows the last reading by each platform, and if a booking overlaps your blocked period, an alert leaves as soon as it appears in a calendar. You then ring back a guest who booked a few hours ago, rather than a family already on the road. The trial lasts 14 days, with no card needed.

One last piece of advice, whichever method you use: keep the habit of reading everything again the next day for important blocks. A block that has been checked once is a block you stop doubting, and that is the whole point: that your family's visit stays a pleasure, and not a matter of calendars.