Introducing Booking Windows
Decide how far in advance co-owners can lock in dates. Set one number for everyone, override it per member, and cap public inquiries separately. Zero means no limit.
The Problem with Booking Too Far Ahead
On a shared property, the calendar is the most valuable thing you own together. So what happens when one co-owner blocks the Fourth of July week for the next three summers, all in one sitting, before anyone else has thought about next year?
Booking far into the future creates two problems. First, it isn't fair: prime weeks get claimed by whoever plans earliest, not by whoever takes a turn. Second, it isn't realistic. Plans made two years out routinely change, and those speculative holds sit on the calendar discouraging everyone else from planning around them.
What a Booking Window Does
A booking window is a simple cap: it limits how far in advance a booking's check-out date can be, measured in days from today. Set it to 365 and every booking has to finish within a year. Set it to 180 and the calendar never opens more than six months out. Set it to 0 and there is no limit at all — exactly how things worked before.
The window is measured against the check-out date, so a long stay has to end within the window, not just begin inside it.
Three Ways to Set It
You will find these under Settings → Booking Rules. Only administrators can change them.
- A property-wide default. One number that applies to every member, including anyone you invite later. This is the right place to start — set it once and it covers the whole group.
- A per-member override. Need to make an exception? Set a different window for an individual member. Leave it blank and that person simply uses the default. Set it to 0 and that person has no limit at all.
- A separate limit for public and guest inquiries. If you publish a public booking page or share an embedded calendar, outside guests get their own window — independent of what your members can do.
That layering means you can keep the common case simple and still handle the exceptions. A typical setup might be a 365-day default for members, no limit for the admins who plan maintenance, and a tighter 120-day window for public inquiries.
Who the Window Applies To
- Members are held to their effective window — their personal override if they have one, otherwise the property default.
- Admins are held to it too, but since the window is editable per member, an admin who needs to book far out can simply set their own number to 0 or to whatever they need.
- Booking on someone's behalf uses that person's window, not the admin's — so the rule stays consistent no matter who does the typing.
- Maintenance, cleaning, and external blocks are exempt. These are operational, not reservations, so an admin can still block a cleaning or an off-platform rental well into the future.
Enforced Everywhere, Not Just the Form
The date pickers throughout OurSharedPlace already stop short at your window, so most people never see an error — the dates that are too far out simply aren't selectable. But the real check happens on the server, which means the window holds no matter where the booking comes from: the web calendar, the public booking page, an embedded inquiry form, or the OurSharedPlace iPhone app.
If a request does slip through — say, from a saved link or an older app version — it's turned away with a clear message explaining how far out bookings are allowed.
A Note on Fairness
Booking windows pair naturally with the other fairness tools in OurSharedPlace. Annual quotas decide how much each member can book; the round-robin queue decides in what order people pick; and the booking window decides how far ahead anyone can reach. Together they keep the calendar honest without anyone having to police it by hand.
And in keeping with how OurSharedPlace treats history, turning on a window never deletes anything. Existing bookings stay exactly where they are; the limit only governs new requests from here forward.