Dates on your Calendar show as unavailable and you can't find the booking behind them, or a guest says they can't book dates that should be free. The likeliest cause is a real booking you forgot about or one that just arrived from a channel, and the fastest check is to click the blocked date on the Calendar: the detail that opens tells you whether it's a booking, a manually blocked period, or an automatic block. If no detail opens and the date only shows a hatched or shaded pattern, it is one of the automatic blocks below. Work through the causes below in order. If it's your whole Smoobu account that's blocked, rather than dates on the calendar, see Why is my account blocked (and how do I unblock it)?.

There's a real booking on those dates

Open your Bookings list, filter by the property and the date range, and look for entries with the Booked status. Most unavailable dates are simply real bookings.

If the booking looks unfamiliar, it can be a channel booking that just synced in, a booking a guest made through your own booking engine (your Website channel), or a manual booking you entered yourself (your Direct booking channel). Click View more on the booking to see the guest, the creation date, and which channel it came from.

If you expected a booking from a channel and it is nowhere in Smoobu, that is the opposite problem: see the next section.

Bookings from a channel are not importing

Sometimes the cause is not on your side at all. A channel connection can stop delivering bookings for a while. The booking exists on the channel, but Smoobu never receives it, so your Calendar still shows those dates as free and you risk taking a second booking for them. This affects any channel, not one in particular.

Check status.smoobu.com first. It shows whether something is currently disrupted and is kept up to date while the work is going on, so you can see the situation for yourself at any time. When imports are affected, our team is on it and treats it as a priority.

Meanwhile, make the dates unavailable yourself so the same dates cannot be booked twice. Which option you use depends on what you know:

• You know the guest's name and the stay dates. Enter the booking yourself, and set Channel to the channel it came from instead of leaving it on Direct booking. Copy the guest name and the arrival and departure dates exactly as the channel shows them. For a Booking.com booking, put the guest's Booking.com contact address (the @guest.booking.com address, which you find in the Booking.com Extranet) in the email field as well, so your automated messages still reach the guest. Airbnb has no address you can use this way: to reach an Airbnb guest, ask them for their email address, or write to them by hand from Messages. The steps are in Enter a direct booking or block dates yourself. Once the connection recovers, that booking imports and fills in the details you did not have, so you never enter them twice.
• You only know the stay dates. Block the dates on your Calendar instead, exactly as you would block them for cleaning or an owner stay: see Enter a direct booking or block dates yourself. When the connection recovers, the real booking arrives alongside your block, and you remove the block yourself afterwards.
• You do not have any details yet. Take the dates from the channel's own extranet or app, or ask the guest, then use whichever option above now fits.

Either way, the dates go out to all your connected channels as unavailable, and that is what protects you from an overbooking while the import catches up.

Once the channel starts delivering again, the real booking arrives. If what you entered matched it exactly, the two merge into one booking and there is nothing left for you to do. If anything did not match, or you blocked the dates instead of entering a booking, Smoobu sees two entries on the same dates and flags the clash with the status Overbooking. That flag sits on your Smoobu calendar only: nothing is cancelled on the channel and your guest keeps their stay. You clear it yourself, and the steps are in My imported bookings look wrong (Overbooking / 1 guest): did something break?.

You blocked the dates yourself and forgot

Hosts block dates for cleaning, owner stays, or maintenance and later forget. Blocked periods you created show as hatched cells on the Calendar. To find them, open the Bookings list and enable Filters > Status > Blocked dates.

If it's a forgotten block, click it to open the detail and cancel it to release the dates.

Buffer days around a nearby booking are blocking the dates

If the blocked dates sit right next to a booking, the cause is usually a buffer. This is a Smoobu setting, called Blocked dates between bookings: the Block days before booking and Block days after booking fields on the property automatically block days around every booking. The setting in Smoobu that Airbnb calls preparation time is this one. Buffer days look exactly like manual blocks (hatched cells), but they are generated for you, and they win over manual changes: as long as the buffer setting is on, you cannot open those dates by hand.

To check and change it:

1. Go to Configuration > Properties and open Edit on the property.
2. Look at Block days before booking and Block days after booking.
3. If they have values, days within that distance of every booking are blocked automatically. To stop it, clear both fields and save.

You cannot release a single buffer occurrence while keeping the setting: buffers are derived from the property settings, not editable one by one. Also note that for channel bookings, the buffer appears when Smoobu imports the booking, a few minutes after the channel confirms it. If buffer days are missing after a guest paid by credit card or PayPal on your own website, see Buffer days missing after a card or PayPal booking.

The property is grouped, and its counterpart is booked

If the property is part of a group, a booking on the main property automatically blocks the same dates on every sub-property, and a booking on any sub-property blocks the main property. Both represent the same physical space, so booking one consumes the other.

To check, open the property's Edit form. If it has a Group accommodations field with a parent selected, this is a sub-property: look at the main property's calendar for an overlapping booking. If the field isn't shown, the property may itself be the main property of a group: look at each sub-property's calendar.

The right fix is usually to leave the automatic block in place. Ungrouping the properties so both stay bookable will get you overbookings.

An iCal feed from another system is blocking the dates

If the property is connected to a channel by iCal (the Vrbo and FeWo-direkt family, or an Individual iCal slot), that feed can carry blocks from the other system. To check, open Channels, look at the iCal connections, and open the source calendar link in your browser to see exactly which events it sends. If the source has a stale or wrong block, fix it in the source system; Smoobu picks up the change on the next synchronization. See How do I sync availability by iCal with a channel that has no direct Smoobu connection?.

The dates won't open, or they keep closing again

If the problem is the reverse (you're trying to open dates and the change won't take effect), set availability from Pricing > Settings > Availability settings: pick the channel and the property, then click Overwrite availabilities. That is the reliable place to open a property's calendar, rather than the availability view reached from Channels. If the dates still won't open, recheck the buffer settings (previous section) and confirm the date range you entered actually covers the dates you want to open.

Check it's fixed

Open the Calendar: the dates now show as available, with no booking bar and no hatched cells. If a guest reported the problem, they can now select those dates. If the block came from an iCal feed, allow time for the next synchronization before checking.

Related articles

• How does Smoobu keep my calendars in sync?
• Enter a direct booking or block dates yourself
• My imported bookings look wrong (Overbooking / 1 guest): did something break?
• My Booking.com bookings or availability aren't syncing
• How do I sync availability by iCal with a channel that has no direct Smoobu connection?
• Why is my account blocked (and how do I unblock it)?

Still stuck?

If these steps didn't fix it, contact the Smoobu team: open the Help menu to open a ticket or book a call slot, or use the chat bubble in the bottom-right corner. To get the fastest answer, please include:

• Your Smoobu User ID (in the profile-icon menu, top right).
• The property name or ID, if it's about one property.
• The Booking ID, if it's about one booking (Bookings, then View more).
• The channel name, if it's about channel sync (Booking.com, Airbnb, Vrbo, and so on).
• A short step-by-step: what you did, what you expected, and what happened.
• Screenshots or a short screen recording of the problem.
• Your browser and operating system, if something looks wrong on screen.