Short-term rentals

Every stay runs itself.
You handle the exceptions.

Bookings from every channel land on one calendar. Each checkout schedules its clean, each arrival gets its instructions, and each owner gets a statement. What needs a person goes on Today.

  • Connects with a calendar link
  • No accounts for cleaners or guests
  • Plain about what calendars cannot do
Illustration with sample data.
The loop

A booking comes in.
Nobody has to remember anything.

Five things happen in order. The first four need no one. The fifth is you, and only when something is off.

  1. A booking arrives

    Lucent checks every connected channel calendar every 15 minutes, and you can sync on demand. The reservation lands on your timeline.

  2. The calendar blocks itself

    The new dates go out through a private calendar feed for each of your other channels, so the same nights are closed everywhere you list.

  3. The clean is scheduled and assigned

    A turnover is created for checkout day, linked to the next arrival, and offered to the rental’s default cleaner when you have set one.

  4. Guest messages are queued

    Booking confirmation, pre-arrival, check-in details, a settling-in check, checkout reminder and thank-you are scheduled against the stay.

  5. Only exceptions reach you

    Overlaps, arrivals that are not ready, cleans nobody has taken, failed messages and sync errors surface on Today with the fix beside them.

Guest messages start in review-first mode, so nothing goes out until you switch a template to automatic. A booking that came from a calendar carries no guest name, email or phone, so messages that need contact details wait until you add the guest or they register on the stay page.

Calendar sync

Connect with a link.
Know what a link can do.

Each channel gives you a calendar link. Paste it in, Lucent tests it, and the bookings appear on one timeline. Then you paste a Lucent link back into each of your other channels so they close the same nights.

Works today
  • Airbnb
  • Vrbo
  • Booking.com
  • Google Calendar
  • Any iCal feed
Coming
  • Two-way connection through a channel manager (Channex)
Illustration with sample data.
What Lucent does

Imports, exports, and catches the overlap

  • Imports each channel’s calendar every 15 minutes, with a Sync now button and a visible last-synced time on every connection.
  • Publishes one feed per channel that carries every booking and block except the ones that came from that channel, so channels never echo each other’s bookings back.
  • Treats a booking as cancelled only after it is missing from two syncs in a row, because channels sometimes serve partial feeds.
  • Keeps overlapping bookings instead of dropping one, outlines both on the calendar, and puts the conflict on Today with a task and a notification.
  • Carries no guest details in the feeds it publishes: only “Reserved” and “Not available”.
What a calendar cannot do

Availability only, and not instant

  • A calendar carries dates only. No prices, guest names, messages or payouts come through it.
  • Airbnb and Vrbo refresh the calendars they import on their own schedule, typically every 1 to 3 hours. A booking made on one channel can take that long to block the dates on another.
  • That gap is the one place a double booking can start. Preparation time and advance notice on each rental narrow it, and Lucent flags an overlap as soon as both bookings are visible.
  • Rates and availability are not pushed to channels. Channels keep their own rates until a channel manager is connected.

To fill in who is coming, forward the channel’s booking confirmation emails to your workspace’s forwarding address. Lucent reads Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com confirmations and matches them to the reservation by confirmation code and dates. Until a guest is added, the stay reads “Airbnb guest · confirmation code” rather than an invented name.

On a phone

Two pages, no logins.
One for the cleaner, one for the guest.

The people who actually turn the unit and arrive at the door should not have to create an account to do it. Both pages are links, built for a phone first.

Illustration with sample data.

The cleaner’s job page

Today’s job, the window and the checklist, on one screen.

  • A link per job, sent to the assigned cleaner. No account, no password, no app to install.
  • The window, the address with a maps link, a same-day flag, and the checklist you set for that rental.
  • Tick items, add notes and attach photos where a photo is required.
  • Checklist taps and notes are queued on the phone and sent when the connection returns. Photos need a connection.
  • Report a broken or missing item from the same page. It reaches you as an issue.
  • The link stops working 48 hours after the cleaning window, and reassigning the job revokes the old link.
Illustration with sample data.

The guest’s stay page

Everything about the stay in one link, with the door code held back until it is needed.

  • One link per reservation with arrival details, house rules, the house manual, Wi-Fi with a QR code, host contact and checkout instructions.
  • Door or lockbox codes and the Wi-Fi password appear only inside the access window you configure, after the guest has registered if you require it.
  • Optional registration: guests, expected arrival time, ID upload and an agreement to your terms.
  • Add the stay to a calendar, report an issue or message the host from the same page.
  • The link stops working 30 days after checkout.
Rates, owners, numbers

The month-end work
is mostly already done.

Pricing rules, owner statements and reports read from the same reservations and turnovers as the calendar, so there is nothing to re-key.

I

Pricing and rates calendar

Build nightly rates from rules: a base rate, weekends, seasons, length-of-stay discounts, early-bird and last-minute pricing, minimum stays and orphan-gap handling. See the result on a rate calendar, edit many nights at once, and run a quote for any stay with fees and taxes.

Rates drive direct quotes and forecasts. They are not pushed to channels today.

II

Owner statements

Statements are built from the period’s reservations, turnovers and expenses: booking revenue, channel fees, cleaning-fee handling, your commission, turnover costs and expenses, with lodging taxes shown as memo lines. Review the drafts, finalize them, and download a PDF.

Net to owner is computed to the cent from the lines shown.

III

Reports and performance

A performance dashboard covers occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, revenue, booking pace, lead time, length of stay, channel mix and cancellations. Twelve reports export to CSV, including lodging tax, revenue by channel, cleaner performance, owner summary and sync health.

Money from calendar-only bookings is labelled as an estimate until a payout is imported.

The rest of the module

What is live today,
and what is not.

Each line below carries one of three labels, so you can tell a feature you can use today from one that depends on a provider account or on work still ahead.

  • Reviews

    Keep reviews from every channel in one hub with category scores, reply tracking and reply drafts you edit before anything is used.

    Available
  • Incidents and damage claims

    Log damage with photos, follow it through to a claim, and track the claim deadline for the channel.

    Available
  • Compliance tracker

    Permits, licences, tax registrations, insurance and inspections per rental, with expiry alerts that reach Today.

    Available
  • Imports

    Bring in past reservations from Airbnb and Vrbo CSV exports, and add rentals in bulk from a spreadsheet.

    Available
  • Channel payouts

    Import payout reports from Airbnb and Vrbo and match each line to its reservation, so estimates are replaced by what you were actually paid.

    Available
  • Smart locks

    Time-bound door codes created and removed for each stay through Seam. Needs your own Seam account. Static keypad codes, lockboxes and in-person handoff work without it.

    Connect your account
  • Direct booking site

    A booking page under your own name, with availability, quotes and card payments. Needs your own payments account.

    Connect your account
  • Two-way channel connection

    Rates, availability and bookings exchanged with the channels in real time through a channel manager, so the calendar delay goes away.

    Coming
  • AvailableShips in the product today.
  • Connect your accountWorks once you connect your own account with that provider.
  • ComingNot live yet.
Security and privacy

Links that expire.
Secrets that stay put.

Guests and cleaners reach their pages without an account, so those pages are built to reveal as little as possible, for as short a time as possible.

I

Signed links, revocable on demand

Guest, cleaner and calendar-feed links are signed tokens tied to a single reservation, job or connection. Regenerating a link kills the old one, and stay and cleaner links expire on their own.

II

Tenancy enforced in the database

Every short-term-rental table is scoped to your organization with row-level security, the same fence as the rest of the platform. Door, lockbox and Wi-Fi secrets sit in a separate table that only your staff can read.

III

ID documents are purged

Guest ID uploads go to a private bucket and are deleted 30 days after checkout by default. You can set the window anywhere from 1 to 365 days. Exports never include ID images.

Calendar links you paste are fetched over https only, with private and internal addresses refused and a size and time limit on every fetch. Lucent never asks for a channel password. The rest of the platform’s security model is on the security page.

Questions

The honest answers
to the usual questions.

Short-term rentals

See the loop on your
own setup.

Book a demo and bring your questions about how you run today. We will show you the loop and tell you plainly which parts are live, which need your own accounts, and which are still coming.

Prefer to write first? Use the contact page.