Holiday lets and winter lets, on one calendar
A four-night stay is not a lease on a monthly cycle, and Protiva does not treat it as one. A stay gets its own rate calendar, its own bookings and its own invoices, with deposits, tourist tax and occupancy figures. In the same books as your long-term leases.
A stay is not a lease
You set which letting types a portfolio contains, and then which one each property is. If you only let on contracts (the default), none of this appears: no menu, no tab, no extra fields.
| Stay (short-term) | Lease (long-term) | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | A rate per night, week, month or season | One monthly amount, indexed once a year |
| Several times a month | ✓ Twenty stays in one month is fine | — One invoice per calendar month |
| Double bookings | ✓ Made impossible in the database, not in the screen | Not applicable |
| Calendar | Availability per night, with blocks for your own use | A start date and an end date |
| Guest or tenant | A guest: name, email and stay, without a tenant file | A tenant with a file, ID check and contract |
| Levies | VAT per night plus tourist tax per municipality | VAT per contract |
From rate to settled stay
Switch the letting type on
Choose which letting types the portfolio contains: contracts only, short stay only, or both. Then decide per property. A house with four rooms can let three of them short and one on a yearly contract.
Set your rates
A price per night, per week or per month for each season, with a minimum number of nights and your own charges. A period without a rate does not produce a €0 quote. Protiva refuses it and names the nights that have no price.
Take the booking
Enter it yourself, receive it through your own booking page, or import it from Airbnb or Booking.com over iCal. The calendar closes those nights the moment you commit.
Invoice and settle
One invoice per stay: accommodation, charges, deposit and tourist tax, each at the right VAT rate. The deposit stays a liability until you set it off or return it.
What you get with it
A rate calendar per season
High season, low season, Christmas: each with nightly, weekly and monthly prices side by side. A leftover period that does not fill a whole package is rounded up to the smallest package that covers it, with the actual number of nights on the invoice line.
A calendar that cannot double-book
The guarantee lives in the database, not in a check you can skip. Two commitments for the same night are refused, including when they arrive at the same moment.
Winter lets on the same calendar
Letting furnished from October to April is the same product: the same calendar, the same blocks, just a monthly rate instead of a nightly one.
A deposit per stay
Per rentable unit you choose whether to invoice the deposit, hold it, or skip it. It sits on your balance sheet as a liability rather than revenue, and settling it follows the same path as it does for a lease.
iCal in and out
Import the calendars of the platforms you also list on, and publish Protiva's calendar back to them. An imported block counts as sold, not as a vacancy.
Registrations per unit
Record your letting registration or permit number on the unit it belongs to, so it sits where you need it.
Cleaning, keys and access
A stay is not finished when the invoice is right. Someone has to clean, someone has to hand over the keys, and the guest has to get in. That happens twenty times a year per unit.
Work orders that create themselves
Every booking you accept produces the final clean and the key handover, in a planned window derived from your check-in and check-out times. Including bookings that arrive over iCal.
Standing contractors
Assign a regular cleaner and keyholder per rentable unit. Anything nobody has yet sits at the top of the work order list, under Not yet scheduled, because an unassigned job is invisible to everyone.
One agenda across your properties
Arrivals, departures, occupied nights and that day's work in a single month grid. Click a day to assign the work straight away.
Access details under lock
Alarm code, gate code and key safe code are stored encrypted and shown masked, with every view recorded in the audit log. A contractor sees them while their job runs; the guest from the day of arrival through the day of departure.
To be honest about what that window is: it is a defensible record of who could know what and when, not a lock. Once a code has been sent, it is out. Which is why a code should change after a departure, and why that is a field to complete on the cleaning job rather than a good intention.
Occupancy, ADR and RevPAN — worked out properly
The property dashboard shows what a short-stay property actually does: the occupancy rate, the average daily rate (ADR), the revenue per available night (RevPAN) and the average length of stay. This year's months sit beside them, elapsed months dark and coming months light.
The work is in the denominator, and that is where a percentage goes wrong. Nights you use yourself, or spend renovating, do not count as available: counting them would punish you for your own holiday. A block that came in from a booking platform does count as sold, otherwise a fully booked house reads as an empty one. And a nightly price that is not known counts as unknown, not as €0.
- ✓ Occupancy for the elapsed period and for the next 90 days, kept apart so your yearly figure does not fall every day
- ✓ ADR over the priced nights, RevPAN over every available night
- ✓ Revenue split pro rata across the month boundary; length of stay counted on the month of arrival
- ✓ Things that expire quietly if nobody looks: an option running out, nights without a rate, a job with no contractor, a gap shorter than your minimum
Two levies that follow the night, not the invoice
VAT follows the night
A stay from 30 December to 3 January can carry two VAT rates on one invoice, because the rate applies per night. So Protiva breaks a stay on a rate boundary as well as on a season boundary. The rate comes from a table with an effective date, per country.
Tourist tax per municipality
Both the rate and what it is charged on differ per municipality, and sometimes per season. You record what your municipality levies, including the difference between a cap on the number of taxable nights and a threshold above which the levy falls away entirely. What you collect is a liability, not revenue, so it does not depress your return.
For the payment there is a filing overview per municipality and per period, with a frozen snapshot and a link to your bank transaction. Filing itself you do yourself: there is no digital channel for tourist tax the way there is for VAT.
Indicative, and based on the rules in force at the time. VAT rates and municipal by-laws change; check the by-law of your own municipality and consult your adviser if in doubt. This is not tax advice.
Your guest gets the app, not a tenant file
A guest staying three nights does not need a tenant file, and should not be given one: no date of birth, no home address, no identity check. They get access to the Protiva app, where they see their booking and the information about the house. On the day of arrival, the codes that let them in appear there too.
What they do not see: other bookings, your books, or who was there before them.
Short-stay letting is part of the full package for the property owner. Put your own booking page next to it to take requests without commission, see how it all fits together under how it works, or go straight to pricing.
Frequently asked questions
Can I combine short-term and long-term letting?
Yes. You set which types a portfolio contains, and then decide per property or per rentable unit. A house with four rooms can let three short and one on a yearly contract; the tabs on the property follow that choice. History never disappears: if you switch a property over, the leases and bookings from before the switch stay reachable.
Does Protiva prevent double bookings?
For everything held in Protiva: yes, and that guarantee lives in the database rather than in a check on the screen. Two commitments for the same night are refused, including when they arrive at the same moment. For calendars on other platforms it is not absolute: iCal is a periodic exchange and those platforms fetch the calendar every few hours, so a booking that falls in that gap can still overlap. That applies to every iCal link, including the one in your current package.
How does VAT on accommodation work?
The rate attaches to the night, not to the invoice date, and it differs per country. Protiva reads it from a rate table with an effective date and splits a stay that runs across a rate change into two lines. At the moment the Netherlands and Spain have been verified by hand; for other countries the rate has not been researched yet, and no rate is invented in the meantime.
Does Protiva calculate tourist tax?
Yes, once you record what your municipality levies. The rate follows the night and can differ per season, and you can set both a cap on the number of taxable nights and a threshold above which the levy falls away entirely. These are two different things, and both appear in real by-laws. What you collect sits on your balance sheet as a liability and does not count as revenue. For payment there is a filing overview per municipality; submitting it is something you do with your municipality.
What happens with the cleaning and the keys?
Every booking you accept produces a final clean and a key handover, in a window derived from your check-in and check-out times. That includes bookings that arrive over iCal. You assign a regular cleaner and keyholder per unit, or schedule each one by hand. Anything nobody has yet sits at the top of the list, because an unassigned job is invisible.
Does my guest get access to my books?
No. A guest gets an account with exactly one thing in it: their own stay, the information about the house, and the access codes. They see those codes only from the day of arrival through the day of departure. They get no tenant file, no date of birth, no home address and no identity check, because a three-night stay does not justify one.
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