Boat availability

Before boats appear on your marketing website, you need to configure when they can be booked, how long each booking can be, and what windows check-in and check-out fall into. All of this lives in availability calendars at

Settings > Marketing > Availability and pricing.

If your fleet takes both multiday charters and single-day day-charter bookings, both models live inside the same calendar.

Pricing — nightly rates that apply to availability windows — is covered on a separate page: Boat pricing.

How calendars work

A calendar is a named container for rules that describe what guests can do on a given date. A freshly created calendar is empty — you bring it to life by adding events to it.

There are five kinds of events, split across two booking models:

Booking model	Event type	Purpose
Multiday	Availability	”Between these dates, guests can check in and/or check out.”
Multiday	Block	”These dates are unavailable.”
Multiday	Price	”Between these dates, the nightly rate is X.” — see Boat pricing.
Day charter	Availability	”On these days, slots run from A to B.”
Day charter	Block	”These slots cannot be booked.”

You build a calendar up by layering events:

• An Availability event opens a window.
• A Block event punches holes in it.
• A Price event tags the window with a rate (covered on the Boat pricing page).

You can have multiple calendars (e.g. Summer 2026, Winter 2026/27), and each can be assigned to specific boats or left unassigned to apply across the whole fleet.

Reading the calendar

Each event on the calendar is shown as a bar with one or more icons that indicate what the event represents at a glance:

Icon	Meaning
	Multiday
	Day charter
	Block
	Price

The exact time of a slot is not shown in the bar label — the calendar grid already shows it, so it stays out of the label to keep things clean.

Note

Prices display as just a number, without a currency symbol. Floatist doesn’t yet track which currency the prices are in, so we show the number rather than guess.

Creating a calendar

Click Create calendar in the sidebar (or use the empty-state button if you have no calendars yet). The Add calendar drawer opens with these fields:

Field	Required	Notes
Name	Yes	Up to 128 characters. Pick something descriptive like Summer 2026 — Standard fleet.
Maximum lead time (months)	Yes	How far in the future, from today’s date, slots can be booked. Defaults to 24, minimum 1.
Boats	No	Multi-select of fleet boats. Leave empty to apply across the whole fleet, or pick specific boats.

Click Add calendar to save. The new calendar appears in the Calendars section of the sidebar and is selected by default.

When to make multiple calendars

Use separate calendars when different boats have fundamentally different availability or pricing structures (e.g. a sailing yacht with weekly Saturday-to-Saturday turnover vs. a motor yacht with flexible nightly stays). If two boats share rules, one calendar with both assigned is simpler to maintain.

Adding events

Click Create event in the sidebar — or click-and-drag in the calendar area to draw a new event. A modal opens to pick the event type. The options shown depend on context:

• Dragging across whole days shows only Multiday options.
• Dragging across hours within a day shows only Day charter options.
• Clicking the sidebar button shows both groups.

Note

New events default to the last calendar you used. If that calendar has been archived, the system falls back to the first non-archived one. You can override the target in the form.

Multiday: Availability event

The bread-and-butter event for multiday charters. Defines a window during which guests can begin a stay (check-in), end one (check-out), or both.

Field	Notes
Start / End date	Inclusive date range. The end picker auto-disables days before the start.
Check-in	If checked, guests can start a booking inside this window.
Time	Earliest time of day guests can check in (e.g. 16:00).
Min nights	Minimum stay length for a booking that starts in this window.
Max nights	Maximum stay length. Must be ≥ Min nights.
Check-out	If checked, guests can end a booking inside this window.
Time	Latest time of day for check-out (e.g. 10:00).
Recurrence	Optional — see Recurrence rules.

If you uncheck either Check-in or Check-out, the corresponding time and nights inputs are visually disabled so you can see they won’t apply.

Same-day turnaround warning

If you set the check-in time earlier than the check-out time (e.g. check-in 11:00 and check-out 16:00), Floatist warns that clients won’t be able to request a booking on the same day another booking checks out. It’s allowed, but rarely what you want for a Saturday-turnover fleet.

Recipe — weekly Saturday-to-Saturday charter:

1. Create an Availability event: Start = first Saturday of the season, End = last Saturday.
2. Check Check-in, Time 16:00, Min nights 7, Max nights 7.
3. Check Check-out, Time 10:00.
4. Add a Weekly recurrence on Saturday, ending on the last Saturday.

Multiday: Block event

A Block event subtracts dates from your availability. Use it for owner holidays, dry-dock periods, maintenance, etc.

Field	Notes
Start / End	Inclusive date range.
Blocks check-in	If checked, guests cannot start a booking on any blocked date.
Blocks check-out	If checked, guests cannot end a booking on any blocked date.
Recurrence	Optional.

You can block only check-ins, only check-outs, or both. Blocking both is the most common — the date is fully off-limits.

Passthrough quirk

A one-day Block with neither blocking flag set has special behaviour: bookings that would normally span across that date are forced to check out before the date. Useful for things like a one-day owner visit where guests must vacate but new charters can start the next day.

Multiday: Price event

Price events attach nightly rates to date ranges. They’re documented in detail on the Boat pricing page, along with the Booking Preview tool you can use to validate your pricing.

Day charter: Availability event

For fleets that offer single-day rentals split into slots (e.g. a 3-hour morning slot, 3-hour afternoon slot, full-day slot).

Field	Notes
Start	Date and start time (e.g. 2026-06-01 09:00).
End	End time on the same day. Crossing midnight isn’t how slots work — use Multiday for that.
Min slots	Minimum consecutive slots a guest must book on the same day. Defaults to 1.
Max slots	Maximum consecutive slots a guest can book on the same day.
Recurrence	Optional — typically a daily or weekly rule.

These control how many back-to-back slots a guest may combine on a single day.

You can also create parallel slots — useful for modelling, for example, half-day and full-day bookings as separate options.

Day charter: Block event

Subtracts time slots from your day-charter availability.

Field	Notes
Start	Date and time the block begins.
End	Time the block ends (on the same day).
Recurrence	Optional.

Multiday ↔ day charter blocking

If a boat offers both multiday and day-charter bookings, you can control whether a booking of one type blocks availability of the other. These two settings live in the Settings panel on the Settings > Marketing > Availability and pricing page and apply across your whole fleet:

Setting	Default	What it does
Day charter bookings block multiday availability	On	When a day-charter slot is booked, overlapping multiday check-in / check-out is blocked for that day.
Multiday bookings block day charter availability	On	When a multiday booking covers a day, day-charter slots on that day are blocked.

Leave both on (the default) when a boat can only do one kind of booking at a time — usually the case. Turn one off only if you genuinely run day charters and overnight stays in parallel on the same boat.

Recurrence rules

Every event type supports a Recurrence section based on the iCalendar RRULE standard. Without recurrence, you’d need to create dozens of nearly identical events; with it, one event can represent an entire season’s worth of weekly slots.

Frequency	Extra controls
None	Single-occurrence event.
Daily	Repeat every N days.
Weekly	Repeat every N weeks; pick one or more weekdays (Mon–Sun).
Monthly	Two sub-modes: absolute day (“the 15th of every month”) or weekday (“the second Tuesday of every month”).
Yearly	Pick the month and either an absolute day or weekday-of-month pattern.

Every frequency has a Stop condition:

• None — runs forever (rarely what you want).
• End date — stops after a specific date. Must be on or after the event’s start.
• After N occurrences — stops after a count.

The form renders a human-readable summary like “Every 2 weeks on Monday and Friday, until 31 Oct 2026” so you can sanity-check the rule before saving.

Bound your recurrences

Always set an end date or occurrence count. Unbounded rules generate occurrences far past your calendar’s Maximum lead time, which can cause confusing behaviour years down the line.

Managing calendars

Each calendar row in the sidebar has a three-dot menu:

• Edit calendar — opens the Update calendar drawer (same fields as Add).
• Archive — hides the calendar from default views and locks it from edits. Existing events are preserved but cannot be modified.
• Unarchive — restores an archived calendar.

A Show archived checkbox below the list toggles visibility of archived calendars. They’re unchecked by default so events in them don’t clutter the calendar view.

Note

Archiving does not delete events — it freezes them. If you want a clean slate, archive the old calendar and create a new one rather than editing events one by one. Your historical bookings will still reference the original events.

Filtering the calendar view

You can narrow what appears in the main calendar without modifying any data:

• Calendars checkboxes — show events from selected calendars only.
• Events checkboxes — show only specific event types (e.g. just Prices and Blocks). Grouped by Multiday and Day charter.
• Boats section — clicking a boat row filters the Calendars list to those assigned to that boat. Each boat row also has an Assign calendars button (the gear icon) for managing which calendars apply to it — see Assigning calendars to your fleet.

You can switch the calendar between four views — Month, Week, Year, and Timeline (a zoomable, Gantt-style view with one row per calendar). Your chosen view, selected event types, and selected calendars are remembered across page navigation.

Assigning calendars to your fleet

Calendars only take effect on a boat once they’re assigned to it. You do this from the Boats section of the sidebar on the same Settings > Marketing > Availability and pricing page:

• Each boat row has an Assign calendars button (the gear icon). Click it to tick the calendars that should apply to that boat.
• Every boat can have zero, one, or multiple calendars. When a boat has several, their events are merged — Availability windows combine, and Blocks from any calendar still apply.
• Clicking a boat row filters the calendar view to its assigned calendars, so you can see its merged picture at a glance.

Assigning a calendar isn't the same as listing the boat

Calendars control when a boat is bookable. Whether a boat is listed at all on your marketing site is controlled separately — see below.

Exposing boats on your marketing site

Whether a boat (or base) appears on your public site is controlled at Settings > Marketing > Bases and boats:

• A boat appears on the public site only when at least one charter mode is enabled: Multiday (), Day charter (), or both. Until then it stays internal — handy while you onboard a boat, assign its calendars, and finish maintenance before it goes live.
• Once a mode is enabled, the availability inside that mode is driven by the calendars and events from the availability and pricing page. In other words: these toggles decide whether a boat is listed; the calendars decide when it can be booked.
• The Slug sets the public URL — /fleet/<slug> for boats and /base/<slug> for bases. Renaming a slug changes the URL immediately, so old inbound links and search results for the previous URL will stop resolving.

Disabling both modes is also the cleanest way to take a boat off the market temporarily without losing any of its calendar configuration.

Tips and gotchas

Layering order

Events layer on top of one another:

1. Availability opens a window.
2. Block carves holes in it.
3. Price tags the dates with a rate.

If a guest’s requested dates overlap a Block, the booking is refused regardless of any overlapping Availability event.

Drag-and-drop saves immediately

Dragging an event in the calendar to move or resize it saves immediately — there’s no Save/Discard prompt. If you drag by accident, drag back to the original position before doing anything else.

Lead time vs. availability

Even with availability rules stretching years out, guests can’t book past the calendar’s Maximum lead time. If you tell your marketing team that bookings are open through 2028 but your lead time is 12 months, the booking flow will silently refuse anything past today + 12 months. Audit this whenever you start a new season.

Unassigned calendars apply fleet-wide

A calendar with the Boats field empty applies to every boat in your fleet. This is convenient for shared fleet-wide rules (e.g. “no bookings on Christmas Day”), but easy to forget when you later want a boat with different rules. Consider always assigning at least one boat explicitly to avoid surprises.

Glossary

Term	Definition
Calendar	A named container of rules (events) that defines when boats are bookable and at what price.
Maximum lead time	The booking horizon — how far ahead of today a guest can book.
Event	A rule attached to a calendar: an Availability, Block, or Price.
Multiday booking	A stay that spans one or more nights, with explicit check-in and check-out.
Day charter	A booking that occupies one or more time slots within a single day, with no overnight component.
Slot	A single bookable time block within a day-charter Availability event.
Recurrence	An iCalendar-style repetition pattern that turns one event definition into many occurrences.
Price event	An event that tags a date range with a nightly rate and a (translatable) name.
Block event	An event that removes dates (multiday) or time slots (day charter) from availability.
Booking Preview	A sidebar tool for simulating what a guest sees when requesting a date range — including the line-item receipt and total price.
Archive	A reversible soft-delete for calendars: hides them and freezes their events without losing historical data.