AirBNB Interface Design - Property Availability

[foxjohnston]

Hi all; 

I am currently in the process of designing an AirBNB-like booking system for a company that leases multiple rental units. I have designed an interface where potential tenants can review the units they can choose from, however I'm running into a snag when it comes to being able to allow them to select their desired move-in and move-out dates (interfaces won't allow for filtering by date fields, apparently) to result in showing them properties that would be available during those times. I have read about using scripting to make this happen but have not been able to develop a script/formula combination that works, and the company doesn't want the responsibility of having to approve booking requests based on a manual check of whether or not that unit is available. 

Does anyone have guidance on how I can accomplish this? At this point I don't even know where to start as far as experimenting or testing to see what the best option would be, and most of the solutions I've found here in the community and in the script marketplace will accomplish this but will only do so internally (ie: from the script box) and I need tenants to be able to do so on their end. 

Hopefully this makes sense - thanks in advance!

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hm, yeah I think you'd need a script for this, and only one person would ever be able to use the Interface at once.  You'd also need to give them some way to key in the dates as well, so you'd either need to have two text fields and ask them to key in their move-in and move-out dates in a format you expect for your script to parse, or you'd make them create a record and key in the dates there.  All doable, mostly JavaScript work so you can ask JavaScript developer to help with this

Also, Interfaces require an Airtable account to view.  Is the expectation that all potential tenants will have an Airtable account?

[ScottWorld]

@foxjohnston Interfaces definitely allow for filtering of date fields, but interfaces are not designed for the general public to use. You might be able to use Softr (which has a short-term property rental template) or Noloco to do what you want, but if those don’t work, Airtable is not really the right backend tool for something like this.

I give a step-by-step tutorial of Noloco on this episode of the BuiltOnAir podcast.

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld