Inherited a holiday home? How to agree who gets to go when

24 September 2026 · 6 min read · by Flo, who's building CasaCal for his own family

The house by the lake now belongs to three siblings. They all want to keep it — and by the first summer, the question comes up that no will answers: who gets to go when?

The good news: most groups of heirs don't fall apart over money, but over expectations nobody spelled out. And expectations can be cleared up — ideally before the first holiday comes round. This article covers the rules that have proven themselves in shared holiday homes, and the order to tackle them in.

Rules first, then the calendar

The most common mistake: the family sets up a WhatsApp group, someone writes "We're heading up for the long weekend in May", and everyone hopes the rest will sort itself out. It won't. A calendar — any calendar — can only reflect what's been agreed beforehand.

Every group of heirs needs three agreements before the first weekend is booked:

How are the sought-after dates shared out? Christmas, Easter, the summer holidays — more on that below.
How binding is an entry? Does "whoever enters it first gets it" apply? Or is there a deadline by which everyone puts in their wishes?
What about guests? Can grown-up children, friends or colleagues use the house on their own — and if so, whose account does it count against?

It's worth writing these three points on a single page and getting everyone's nod. Not as a contract, but as a shared memory: otherwise, two years from now, everyone will remember it differently. (How to organise the sharing in principle — first come, first served, rotation, quotas or fixed weeks — is covered in the comparison of the four sharing models.)

The four questions to settle once

1. Public and school holidays. The only dates people really fight over. Those with school-age children can only go in the holidays; those without are flexible — and still quickly feel short-changed when "the ones with kids" always get August.

2. Short notice. Can someone book on Thursday for Friday? Most families do well with: yes — what's free is free. What matters is that it happens visibly and bindingly, not by word of mouth.

3. Duties at the end of a stay. Whoever leaves hands the house over the way they'd want to find it: bins out, fridge empty, heating down. Sounds trivial, but it's the second most common flashpoint after the holidays — a short checklist on the fridge (or a digital one) saves the argument about what "leaving it tidy" means.

4. The costs. Fixed costs (insurance, property tax, reserves) are paid by all co-owners in proportion to their share — regardless of use. Running costs (electricity, firewood, final cleaning) are paid by whoever was there. This split is the standard because it satisfies both senses of fairness: owning costs money, and so does using.

Holidays: rotation beats discussion

For Christmas, Easter and the summer holidays, one simple principle has proven itself: a fixed rotation instead of negotiating every year. (In detail, with swap rules and the summer-holiday special case: sharing the holidays fairly.)

Example for three households: family A has Christmas this year, family B Easter, family C the first three weeks of summer. Next year, everything moves one place along.

The beauty of rotation: nobody has to argue every year why they "really need" Christmas this time. The order is set, and swapping is still allowed — but as a swap between two households, not a renegotiation with everyone.

For the summer holidays, an extra rule is worth having if only some of the heirs have school-age children: the school-holiday weeks rotate among the families with children, and the off-season is open to everyone. That puts nobody at a disadvantage — the flexible ones have the whole rest of the year.

Changeover day: half days prevent the first argument

An underrated detail: what happens on the day one family leaves and the next one arrives?

If the calendar only knows whole days, that Saturday is double-booked — or it's left empty just in case, and both families lose a night. Either way, you get exactly the friction you wanted to avoid. The solution is as simple as it is unspectacular: the changeover day belongs to the people leaving in the morning and to the people arriving in the afternoon. Departure by 11am, arrival from 3pm, with time in between for cleaning or the handover.

Settle that once and stays can follow one another without gaps — and "But you were still there when we arrived" disappears from the family vocabulary.

Fair doesn't mean equal

Almost every group of heirs has an imbalance like this: one household lives an hour away and goes up every other weekend, the other lives 600 kilometres away and manages twice a year.

The reflex to even that out "fairly" through the calendar leads nowhere. What works instead: use is open, the sought-after dates rotate, and whoever is there much more often visibly takes on more responsibility — the lawn, the appointments with tradespeople, clearing the snow in winter. If the imbalance is very large, you can weight the running costs more heavily by use. What matters is that the figures behind it are beyond dispute: nobody should have to reconstruct from memory who stayed how many nights.

What you don't need (yet) — and when you do

As long as everyone agrees, organising the calendar usually doesn't call for a notarised usage agreement or a formal legal structure set up just for the house. A written agreement that everyone has confirmed is enough for everyday life.

Get a professional involved when something more fundamental comes up: when one heir wants to be paid out, when the joint inheritance is to become a permanent co-ownership arrangement, or when the positions have already hardened. That's a job for a notary or a lawyer who specialises in inheritance — a calendar won't solve a conflict that's really about ownership. How inheritance and co-ownership work legally differs from country to country, so get advice from someone who knows the rules that apply in your case. (By the way, this article isn't legal advice — just what works in practice.)

So where do you keep the calendar?

In the end, each of these rules needs a place where it's visibly lived. The WhatsApp group isn't it — messages get buried, and nobody scrolls back three months to check whether the long weekend in May is already taken. A spreadsheet is better, but it has two notorious weaknesses: it lives on one person's computer, and it doesn't prevent double bookings — it only records them.

What matters, whichever tool you choose: everyone sees the same state, entries are binding, overlaps are impossible rather than just unlikely, and a changeover day with half days can be shown. That's exactly what we built CasaCal for — but the rules in this article work on paper too. The main thing is to agree on them before the first holiday comes round.