How to take over a B&B without losing a single booking

Yes, finally the B&B is yours. High five!

The keys are about to change hands. And with them come 43 future bookings you didn’t take, from guests who have never heard your name.

Most of them will arrive without a thought about who owns the place. A few will turn up to a booking the old system lost track of. Whether anyone notices the handover comes down to the weeks before you sign.

Still going? Let’s dive deeper into the step-by-step B&B handoff.

Before you sign: what to ask the seller for

A B&B sale usually focuses on the building, the furniture and the accounts. The bookings are easy to overlook, because they live in different places.

Gather every future booking. Ask for an export from the booking system, then ask the question that matters: “Is there anything that isn’t in there?” Phone bookings, a regular who emails every spring and a group penciled into a diary are potential blind spots.

Money already paid. If a guest paid a deposit in November for a stay in July, the seller has that money and you’ll host the stay. Agree in writing how that money is settled, perhaps as an adjustment to the price.

Channel accounts and logins. List every site the B&B sells on: Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, the local tourism site, the booking engine on the website. For each one, note whose name the account is in.

The guest list, and what guests agreed to. Most likely, past guests are part of what you’re buying. What you can do with that list depends on what they were told when they booked (more on that below).

Reviews and listing history. These carry years of trust. On Booking.com and Airbnb they often stay with the old owner’s account, so ask each site early whether you can keep them.

This isn’t legal advice. Your lawyer or broker should check how bookings, deposits and data are covered in the sale agreement.

Who looks after guests during handover week

Guests booked with the seller, so the first few weeks are often a shared job. Decide who answers which messages, and until when.

Why not send one short email to every guest with a future stay? Let them know there’s a new owner, that their booking and price stay exactly the same, and who to contact from now on. It takes about ten minutes, and it can head off the anxious “is my booking still valid?” message.

Keep the seller’s number handy for the first month. Someone will always ask where the extra pillows are kept.

Moving the listings: Booking.com, Airbnb and the rest

And now, the part you might have been dreading. It often takes longest, so start as soon as the takeover date is fixed.

Booking.com. The current owner starts the change of ownership in the extranet and gives the takeover date. Booking.com then asks you for your company, bank and VAT details and sets up a new agreement. Expect to reconnect your channel manager, too. What happens to the review score and existing reservations can vary, and Booking.com doesn’t spell it out publicly, so ask partner support early.

Airbnb. Airbnb doesn’t transfer listings, reservations or account ownership between hosts, so you’ll create a new listing under your own account. For stays already booked on the seller’s listing, the seller can add you as a co-host, which lets you message those guests until they’ve checked out. Reviews are unlikely to follow you, but it’s worth asking Airbnb support.

Vrbo. Vrbo has its own property sale policy. The seller tells guests with upcoming stays about the sale, offers a full refund to anyone who’d rather cancel, and blocks dates after the takeover. You create a new listing, and reviews can be moved on request. If you both agree to honor existing bookings, Vrbo support can move them to your listing, on the same terms or better.

Everyone else. Expedia, Hostelworld, local tourism sites and the website booking engine each have their own process. Contact each one with the takeover date and ask what they need. Write down each answer as it comes in, because a channel nobody updates is how double bookings happen.

Phew, that took some brain power. Make sure to refill those burned calories with something sweet, or the liquid kind. You’ve earned it.

The booking handover: avoiding double bookings

On takeover day there should be one calendar that every channel reads from, and it should be yours.

Bring every future booking into it: the system export, the bookings on each channel and the phone bookings from the notebook. Then compare it, channel by channel and date by date, against what each site shows. If the numbers don’t match, find out why before you open new dates.

Switching to a new booking system at the same time? Give yourself a little time for the move, and make one test booking to check it lands where it should. A careful hour now costs less than two families arriving for the same room in August.

What about the previous owner’s guest list?

You can keep the guest records that come with the business, and you can use them for what they were collected for: running the stays guests booked. You need to tell those guests that the business has a new owner and how to reach you.

Marketing is different. Only email past guests with offers if they agreed to hear from the B&B, and give them an easy way to opt out from the first message. If a guest never agreed, a warm “we’ve taken over, here’s who we are” is about as far as you should go.

The times they are (carefully) a-changing

Looking forward to making the place completely your own? Whether you plan to keep things as they are or have the paint charts out before the contract is signed, make sure guests who already booked get the stay they paid for.

Read the reviews before you change anything. Go through the last two years and note what guests praise by name: the porridge, the view from room 3, the late check-in that was never a problem. Those details give you valuable insight before you make any changes.

Keep the listings in step with the work. Before the builders move in, close those rooms in your calendar so no channel sells them. When the change is done, put new photos, room names and descriptions on every channel the same day, so guests book the place as it is now, not as it was.

Change one thing at a time if you can. New prices, a new breakfast and a new check-in time in the same month make it hard to tell what worked. Change one, watch bookings and reviews for a few weeks, then move to the next.

Sirvoy makes it easy, either way

If the B&B already runs on Sirvoy, the seller can transfer the account to you. The seller updates each booking site through that site’s own ownership process, exports the booking history and disconnects their payment provider. Stored guest cards are deleted at that point, so agree how card guarantees for upcoming stays will be handled.

If you’re moving from another system, you can import existing bookings with a spreadsheet file. Future Booking.com reservations come in automatically when you connect that channel, and Airbnb bookings can be imported from the Airbnb connection page. Our support team, available around the clock in nine languages, can help you plan it around your takeover date.

Happy B&B takeover!