We do not take a booking we cannot honour

Four things on sale, one building

There are four things on sale and they are the same building, so a night sold in one apartment takes the whole house off the calendar and a night sold as the house takes all three apartments off it. That rule is in the booking system rather than in a member of staff's head, and it is the reason this site can show a live calendar at all. What it does not do is guarantee that the dates you want are free — it guarantees that what it shows as free is free.

The three apartments and the whole house are not four independent products with four independent calendars that happen to share a street address; they are four different ways of asking for the same rooms. The booking system holds that relationship as data rather than as something a person at a desk has to remember, which is the only way a night can be sold in one apartment and taken correctly off sale in the other three places it would otherwise still appear.

What the live calendar actually promises

This calendar is real. This booking system is real software running against a real database, and it will refuse a night that is already taken. It is not a real guest house, so nothing you book here reserves anything.

Showing a date as free is not a guess and it is not optimism — it means nothing already holds that night in any of the four forms the building can be sold in. It does not mean the date you want will still be free tomorrow, because somebody else is looking at the same calendar; it means that what it shows right now is checked against the same rule the booking system enforces before it takes a deposit.

The direction that is easiest to forget is the one that runs from an apartment to the house rather than from the house to an apartment. Booking the whole house obviously has to close all three apartments — that half is intuitive. What is less obvious is that booking a single apartment closes the whole house for that night as well, because the whole-house let is not a separate room somewhere else in the building; it is the same three apartments, the garden and both kitchens, sold as one thing. A calendar that only enforced the first direction would let somebody book The Loft Apartment for a night and then let somebody else book the whole house for that same night, discovering the conflict only when both parties arrived.

The gap between one stay and the next

Part of honouring a booking is not promising an arrival the building cannot physically be ready for. The changeover between a departure and the next arrival takes real time, more of it for the whole house than for one apartment, and the calendar accounts for that gap rather than scheduling straight through it.

Where this leaves you

The honest version of "we will try to fit you in" is a calendar that says no when the answer is no, and shows the real minimum stay when a shorter one is not available — not to be difficult, but because a maybe kept until the day before arrival is worse for a guest than a refusal a month ahead of it. Check the live calendar rather than asking by telephone for a guess it cannot honestly give you either.