Moving to SortedStay —
without a gap in bookings

Guides · Updated 12 October 2026

The worry with moving to a new system is the gap: a week where bookings land in one place and not the other, and you find out when two families turn up at the same door. The way to avoid it is not to switch in one go. You run SortedStay alongside your current setup first, let it prove itself on real bookings, and only then move your channels across — on one morning, with a way back.

1. Bring your properties across

Paste an Airbnb, Booking.com or Offer2Stay listing link and SortedStay imports the title, description and photos — or add a property by hand in a few minutes. Photos are copied into SortedStay’s own storage, so nothing breaks the day you close an old account.

2. Run both side by side

Connect your existing calendars by iCal so SortedStay fills with your real bookings and owner blocks. It only ever reads during this stage — nothing changes in your current setup — so the old system stays the boss while you get to know the new one.

• Your calendar in SortedStay fills with your real bookings, past and upcoming.
• Your channels — Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo — stay connected exactly as they are.
• You see every message, clean and price in the new place before anyone depends on it.

3. Get everything else ready while nothing is at stake

This is the work that makes switch-over day boring, which is exactly what you want:

• Guest messagesBooking confirmation, check-in details and a check-out reminder, in your own words.
• Door codes and Wi-FiFor each property. Codes are held back until 48 hours before arrival.
• Your cleaning teamInvite them to their own dashboard. Changeover cleans are then created automatically for every check-out.
• PricingYour base and minimum prices, and your PriceLabs key if you use it.
• PaymentsConnect Stripe so your own site can take bookings and pay you directly.
• Channel managerCreate your properties in Channex and map them, but don’t connect a single channel yet.

4. Switch-over day

Pick a quiet midweek day with no arrivals or departures, and start in the morning. Booking.com takes a few days to process a change of connectivity provider, so request it the week before. Then, in this order:

1. Check the calendar in SortedStay matches your current one, booking for booking.
2. Disconnect Airbnb and Vrbo from your old setup, then connect them in Channex and map each listing.
3. Booking.com switches across when its change goes through.
4. Switch your website to take bookings itself.
5. Watch for an hour: make a test booking, check it lands, the confirmation goes and the clean is created. Cancel it.

If anything goes wrong, the way back is the same day: reconnect the channels where they were. Keep the old account open but idle for a month afterwards, for refunds and old guest threads, then close it.

How long does it take?

The import is minutes. The side-by-side run is as long as you want it to be — a couple of weeks is plenty to see real bookings, cancellations and price changes come through. Switch-over itself is a morning. We’d rather you took a fortnight and slept well than rushed it in an afternoon.

Start your free 6 months and do steps 1 and 2 today — nothing in your current setup changes until you decide it should.