How to Import Your Airbnb & VRBO Bookings from Excel or CSV

Most hosts start with a spreadsheet. A tab for 2023, a tab for 2024, maybe one per property — and years of valuable history: repeat guests, seasonal patterns, real revenue per property. When you move to dedicated software, that history should come with you. Here's how to get it out cleanly.

First: export what the platforms already have

Before wrestling with your own spreadsheet, grab the official exports — they're the cleanest source of truth for platform bookings:

• Airbnb: Host dashboard → Insights → Earnings → "Get earnings report" (CSV). Or Reservations → All reservations → Export.
• VRBO: Owner Dashboard → Reservation Manager → Export → CSV.
• Booking.com: Extranet → Finance → Reservation statements → Download as CSV.

Each platform names its columns differently ("Guest name" vs "Booked by", "Check-in" vs "Arrival"), which is why good import tools map columns instead of demanding a fixed format.

What a clean booking import needs

Whatever the source, a booking record needs at minimum a guest name and a check-in date. Everything else is enrichment — check-out, nights, platform, fees, payout, confirmation code. If your spreadsheet has those two columns, it's importable.

The classic gotchas that break imports:

• Excel date cells. A date can be stored as text ("1/15/2024") or as an actual date value. Naive importers read date values as serial numbers like 45123 and choke. Good ones handle both.
• Title rows above the header. "Lakeside Cottage — Bookings 2024" in row 1, blank row 2, real headers in row 3. Importers that assume headers-on-row-one map your data to garbage.
• Currency formatting. "$1,310.00" needs to become 1310, and accounting-style "(85.00)" is a negative number.
• Ambiguous columns. A "Total" column should map to the payout amount — not get confused with "To" as in check-out date.

The multi-tab problem

Here's where most import tools fall over: real host spreadsheets are multi-tab workbooks. One tab per year, or per property, plus a summary tab, maybe a chart. Most importers silently read only the first tab — which is often the summary — and you end up importing two rows of totals or, worse, thinking your history came over when it didn't.

The workaround people resort to is saving each tab as a separate CSV and importing them one at a time. It works, but it's tedious and error-prone across five tabs and three properties.

StayVue's importer reads every tab in the workbook, figures out which ones actually contain bookings (a "Summary" tab with three totals doesn't look like bookings; a tab with guest names and check-in dates does), and lets you tick the ones you want. Column mapping is auto-proposed per tab, fixes copy automatically across tabs with identical columns, and everything imports in a single pass — with one undo button covering the whole thing if the result isn't what you expected.

A sensible import workflow

1. Export or gather your source files — platform CSVs plus your own workbook.
2. Skim the data first. Consistent date formats? Guest names present? A payout column?
3. Import into the right property. History is only useful attached to the correct listing.
4. Review the preview before committing. A good importer shows you what's about to happen — row counts per tab, rows that will be skipped and why.
5. Spot-check afterwards. Pick three bookings you remember and confirm dates and payouts match.

What to do with the history once it's in

Imported history is more than a backup — it's your pricing dataset. Which months actually filled up? What did repeat guests pay? How did payouts trend year over year? It also feeds your books: pair booking history with tracked costs (see our expense tracking guide) and you finally get true per-property profit instead of a gut feeling.

StayVue imports CSV and multi-tab Excel out of the box, keeps everything on your own device, and costs a one-time $59.99 — no subscription. Your spreadsheet years weren't wasted; bring them with you.