Before you start

Why add booking and contact information into 365Villas?

When you first access your 365Villas account, you will want to add all your past, present, and future bookings. It is important to populate your 365Villas account with guest and booking information for four main reasons:

1. To Avoid double bookings: As soon as you connect your 365Villas account with channels such as Vrbo, Booking.com, and Airbnb, the system will synchronize new bookings received from that moment onward. However, with the exception of Airbnb, it will not be able to import past or pre-existing bookings, so it is crucial to do this before starting the channel manager connection.

2. Guest communications: Once live, 365Villas will help you automate all guest communications.

3. Reporting and Accounting: 365Villas will help you have accurate accounting, owner statements, and reports for the future and, if you decide to upload past bookings, for previous years.

4. Marketing and CRM: You will be able to check guests that stayed at your properties and target them with newsletters and email campaigns.

This step is therefore normally done only once during your onboarding period of 365Villas.

Importing bookings from Airbnb or Uploading reservations?

For Airbnb, you can decide whether to import bookings via the Channel Manager or upload them via Excel. The first option is normally quicker; it also allows you to have an accurate breakdown of the taxes, the Airbnb fee, and services and is therefore recommended. However, please be sure you have uploaded all other bookings and blocks before proceeding with this, and that you communicate to your account manager and your channel manager trainer that you wish to import bookings, so they can advise on the exact steps to take.

Property set up

Reservations can be uploaded only after your properties are in 365Villas. Properties, can in turn either be added manually or imported from Airbnb. In both cases, it is important that your 365Villas property settings are accurate. In particular, it is important that your payment policies, taxes, services, commissions and expense are correctly setup.

Owners and Maintenance Blocks.

Owners and maintenance blocks should be added in 365Villas as blocks. It can be done by simply selecting the dates on your calendar and confirming them. You can also add a note.

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Uploading Reservations and Contacts

Uploading reservations

Simply click “Upload Quotes & Bookings” to get the pop-up.

Once there, just follow the instructions provided. The system will prompt you to download our Excel template and populate your contacts, quotes, and bookings as you like, either as tentative or confirmed status. Be sure not to alter the template and to fill in all the mandatory fields (marked in orange). When you’re done, just upload the template into 365. All your calendars will then be updated, and your quotes and bookings will also be fully present in your 365 accounts.

If you update the excel with the necessary information, 365Villas will also record and start tracking your payment schedules for these transactions as well. As indicated above, it’s important to ensure you are happy with your property settings in 365 before you upload transactions from outside the system. Specifically, you want to make sure that your payment policies, taxes, services, commissions and expenses are accurate. These settings will not retrospectively affect existing (already uploaded transactions) if you change them after the fact.

Errors

Before uploading all your reservations, we suggest doing a test with 5 reservations only. In this way, you can test how information is reflected in the reports, CRM, transaction editor, and owner statement and make changes as necessary. For the same principle, we recommend never uploading more than 200 reservations at a time and to double-check them as they get uploaded.

If you have trouble uploading, the system should tell you where you have errors in your spreadsheet. Simply open it and look at the error log in the far right column. If the error log is blank, it’s probably because you tried to upload in .xlxs. You can successfully upload in .xlxs, but error tracking is currently only supported for .xls, which you should ideally try in the first instance. If you’re having trouble, simply save your file in .xls and try again, assuming you don’t see any obvious errors you can correct first. Please do not use Page for Mac to work on this spreadsheet.

If you are uploading sales channel bookings that are not directly to our channel manager (for example, Booking.com), remember they are not directly connected to the original booking in the sales channel. They are like any other regular manual booking. This means that if the booking gets updated or deleted in the sales channel (i.e., Booking.com), you will have to manually update/cancel the booking in 365Villas.

Troubleshooting tips:

• If you still have trouble after reviewing the above, please send us your spreadsheet with a request to help you troubleshoot and we’ll be happy to assist.
• Date Format: Note the spreadsheet is requesting dates in DD/MM/YY format, not MM/DD/YY format. Here is how it can be managed.
• Check-in/check-out dates are incorrect: The check-out date is prior to the check-in date, or the check-in and check-out date are the same. The system will prevent creating transactions in both cases.
• The email address of the guest is missing: Email address is always mandatory to create a transaction. If for any reason you do not have an email address for the guest, you can include your company email address or a valid test email address. Please do not use the same email address you have included in the email setting.
• Conflicting format: A conflicting format has been ported when pasting the information in the 365Villas CSV template. Please ensure that no conflicting formatting was imported from an external source. To avoid it, please paste the information without formatting.
• Property name: The property name needs to be exactly as you included it in 365Villas property provider. You can use either the internal or external property name. If it does not match perfectly, the system will not be able to generate the booking. This includes additional spaces before and/or after the property name.

If you still have trouble after reviewing the above, please send us your spreadsheet with a request to help you troubleshoot, and we’ll be happy to assist.

Bookings breakdown

In 2023, we added some options to allow you to import bookings with the exact breakdown you need for your owner statement and accounting.

• 365Villas will use the price in your rates settings unless you specify the grand total in column “Z”.
• 365Villas will add your default expenses and commissions to each booking. If you had bookings in the past with different commissions settings, we suggest to a) upload the future reservations with the current settings → make changes to the settings → upload the past reservations with the old setup → revert the initial settings.
• In column “Z”, you can decide if to include taxes and services manually in the Excel upload by populating column “AA to AE” or have the system using your default settings.

Uploading contacts only

If you wish to populate, only contact information, you can use the same excel file. Mandatory information is the name and email address (Columns C and D). You can decide to also add the phone number and address in column “S” and “T”.

Help

If you still have trouble after reviewing the above, please send us your spreadsheet, and we’ll be happy to assist.