Where Your Bookings Are Actually Sold
Here is a question that sounds easy: where can a guest book Villa 1 today?
Most hosts get it roughly right and miss the details. It is on Airbnb, of course. Booking.com, probably, unless it was paused in the spring. The direct booking page should be live, unless someone switched direct bookings off during the renovation. There might also be an old Vrbo listing still up that nobody has checked since 2024.
Nobody writes this list down, because it only matters when something goes wrong. A guest tells you they found you on a site you forgot about. A booking email arrives and doesn’t land on the right property. A friend asks for the link to your own site, and it turns out the domain never finished connecting.
This post is not about juggling five platforms day to day. We covered that in Managing Bookings from 5 Platforms. It is about something simpler: a list of every place each property is for sale, and whether each one is actually live.
The block at the bottom of the page
Scroll to the bottom of the bookings list or the calendar in Airflow and you’ll find a section called Where your bookings are sold. It holds one small tile for each place a property can be booked, and clicking a tile opens that place.
If you manage several properties, each one gets its own row. The block follows the same organisation and property filter as the rest of the page, so when you narrow the list to Cottage 2, the tiles narrow too.
There are two kinds of tile.
Your own surfaces
First come the places Airflow publishes for you. Each is either live, with a coloured tile that opens the page, or dimmed with the reason it isn’t live:
- Own website: your property on your own domain. It stays dimmed until the domain is connected and active, and the tile tells you whether it is missing (“no custom domain”) or still waiting.
- Airflow Host page: the property’s page on its airflowhost.com address. When it is live, the tile also says whether it is “taking direct bookings” or has “direct bookings off”.
- Airflow Stay and Airflow Guest: whether the property is set to appear on our guest marketplace and trip planner. Airflow Stay is still in a pre-launch phase, so for now treat these two tiles as a setting you can check, not as a channel bringing you bookings.
- Embedded widget: the booking widget you can put on a site you already have. This tile doesn’t open a page. “Get embed code” takes you to Connections, to the Iframe embed — direct bookings card, where you pick the property and copy the code.
Dimmed tiles are often the most useful ones. “Listing draft” or “direct bookings off” on a property you thought was taking bookings is a problem you would otherwise find out about from a guest, or never.
The channels
Next comes one tile for each outside channel the property is listed on: Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, Expedia, Agoda, Tripadvisor, or “Other channel”.
You don’t have to build this list from scratch. Airflow fills it in from three places:
- channels you have added yourself in property settings
- calendar feeds you have connected. For an Airbnb feed, Airflow can read the listing number from the feed address and work out the public listing link for you.
- channels that appear on the property’s bookings from the last twelve months
Each channel tile shows the listing title, how many bookings came from that channel in the last twelve months, and “calendar linked” if a feed is connected. If Airflow has a link to the listing, Open listing takes you straight to the public page, so you can check the photos, price and title the way a guest sees them.
A Booking.com calendar feed doesn’t include the listing’s identity, so Airflow can’t work out that link on its own. You paste it once in settings.
Why the title under each channel matters
The title under each channel tile is not just a label. It is the text Airflow matches when a booking email arrives.
If you connect your Gmail or Outlook inbox, Airflow reads booking confirmations as they arrive and has to decide which property each one is for. Channels name your listing in their emails the way you named it on the channel: “Sea-view Villa with Pool”, not “Villa 1”. So Airflow needs that exact title to link the email to the right property.
When it doesn’t have one, the tile says so in amber: “Title not set — booking emails may not route here”, and it links to the place to fix it. That is a routing failure you can see before it happens, rather than a booking you discover a week later sitting unmatched. (If you want to know when things do fail, Thirty Emails, or One covers how Airflow reports silent failures.)
Managing the list
The tiles are read-only. They show you the current state and link out. You change things in one place: Property settings → Email & Actions → Channels this property is listed on. The “Manage channels” link at the top of the block, the dashed Add a channel tile, and any channel with a missing title all take you there.
For each channel you set two things:
- the listing title, exactly as that channel shows it
- the link to the public listing
Save, and the title goes straight into the list of names Airflow matches booking emails against, so the next email from that channel is routed correctly. If you also let under an older name still used in some emails, there is an optional Other titles to match field for that.
Adding a channel needs a manager role or above.
The same tiles also appear on the property’s settings page, as Where this property is sold. There they are limited to that one property, so you can check your titles against what is live without leaving the page.
What this is not
It helps to be clear about the limits.
It doesn’t connect or sync anything. Adding Vrbo as a channel records where the property is listed and what the listing is called. It doesn’t create a Vrbo listing, push prices, or open a calendar feed. Calendars are still connected on their own, and if they are giving you trouble, Why Your iCal Sync Keeps Breaking is the place to start.
“Live” means Airflow’s view of it. An Airbnb tile tells you Airflow knows about the listing and has a link to it. It can’t see whether Airbnb has snoozed the listing this week. That’s why every channel tile opens the real page: the check takes one click, and the channel’s own page is the answer.
It isn’t a performance report. The booking count is there to show you which channels are active, not to rank them. If you want to know what each channel costs you, that is a different question, answered in Airbnb Says 15%. Your Books Say 18.4%.
Why a list is worth keeping
Selling in more places is easy. Remembering all of them is not. Every forgotten listing is a page with your photos and your calendar that you are no longer checking. Every property with no matching title is one where booking emails may not reach the right place.
A list you don’t have to maintain by hand, at the bottom of pages you already open every day, fixes both. You’ll glance at it, see that Cottage 2’s Booking.com title was never set, fix it in a minute, and the next email lands where it should.
If you are also thinking about how much of your business should come through your own channels, see how an Airflow booking website fits in.
Try it
Create an account, add a property, and connect its calendar feeds. The channels you already use start appearing as tiles. Set each listing’s title once, and the block at the bottom of your bookings list becomes the one place that answers “where can a guest book this?”