Google Calendar vs. Keyra for a Shared Holiday Home
Almost every shared holiday home starts with a shared Google Calendar. It is free, everyone already has it, and it takes two minutes to set up. For some groups that is genuinely the end of the story.
For others it is where the friction begins — usually not with the calendar itself, but with everything a calendar was never meant to do: deciding who gets the first week of August, tracking who paid the heating bill, and telling a guest where the stopcock is. This is an honest look at where that line falls.
When a shared Google Calendar is genuinely enough
Two households, a handful of stays a year, no weeks that everyone wants at once, and one person who pays the bills and sorts it out later. In that situation a shared calendar is the right answer and a subscription would be waste — keep the calendar.
The honest signal that you have outgrown it is not the number of stays. It is the first argument: someone books a week another family had assumed was theirs, or a bill arrives and nobody can reconstruct who owes what.
Side by side
| Criterion | Keyra | Google Calendar |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free starter plan; Premium €4.99/month or €50/year per home (30-day trial, no card), Pro €7.99/month for co-owned homes | Free |
| Booking a stay | Request → approval, with a visible history of who asked and who agreed | Anyone with edit access writes straight into the calendar |
| Double bookings | Prevented by the system | Allowed silently — overlapping events just sit side by side |
| Peak weeks (summer, Christmas) | Optional fair-rotation turn order for contested periods, with a response deadline and auto-skip (Pro); approval rules everywhere else | Whoever books first wins |
| Costs & bills | Recorded against the house, with a per-owner annual settlement: fixed costs by ownership share, usage costs by nights stayed | Not a calendar feature — needs a separate spreadsheet |
| House information | Structured house manual with checklists, inventory and emergency contacts | Not a calendar feature |
| Documents | Ownership papers, insurance policies and warranties stored against the house on EU servers (from Premium) | Not a calendar feature |
| Guests | Magic link with stay details, WiFi and lockbox code — no account, expires after the stay | A calendar invitation, nothing more |
| Keeping your own calendar | iCal feed — approved stays appear in Google or Apple Calendar automatically | — |
Verdict
Google Calendar is very good at being a calendar, and that is precisely the limit. A shared holiday home is not really a scheduling problem: it is an agreement problem — who may book what, who owes whom, and where the information lives when the person who knows it is on holiday themselves.
So this is not a replacement. Keyra publishes an iCal feed, and most people keep using Google Calendar to actually look at their week. What Keyra adds is the part a calendar has no opinion about: approval, fairness for the weeks everyone wants, costs, house knowledge and guest access.
Frequently asked questions
Can we just use Google Calendar for a shared holiday home?
Yes, and for two households with a few stays a year it is the sensible free choice. It starts to strain when several families compete for the same school-holiday weeks, when costs need splitting between owners, or when guests need house information — a shared calendar has no approval step, no cost tracking and no place for the house manual.
Can I use Keyra and Google Calendar together?
Yes, and most people do. Keyra provides an iCal feed you subscribe to in Google Calendar or Apple Calendar, so approved stays at the house show up automatically alongside the rest of your life. Booking and approval happen in Keyra; your personal calendar stays where it is.
How do you stop double bookings in a shared calendar?
You largely cannot in Google Calendar — anyone with edit access can create an overlapping event and nothing warns them. The usual workarounds are a rule that everyone asks in the group chat first, or one person who owns the calendar. Both depend on people remembering. A booking workflow with approval removes the possibility rather than relying on discipline.
How should families decide who gets Christmas or the first week of August?
First-come-first-served rewards whoever checks the calendar most often, which is the most common cause of resentment in shared houses. The alternatives are a rotating first-choice order that shifts every year, a points or draft system, or a drawing of lots. Keyra's Pro plan automates the rotation for periods you mark as contested — each owner gets a turn in an order that rotates annually, with a deadline that passes the turn on if nobody responds.
Bring calm to your shared holiday home
Keyra combines a stay calendar with approvals, a house manual, tasks & expenses and guest access via link — one subscription per home, not per person. Start free; Premium is €4.99/month (30-day free trial).
Start for freeAll third-party information is provided in good faith as of June 2026, without warranty. Prices and features change — the vendors' own pages are authoritative.