The Vacation Calendar was first started in 2006 and was built specifically for my wife's step-father's family. They have an amazing beach house in the Outer Banks, NC which they share amoung five brothers. They had one brother who was in charge of the "official calendar" and the result was an underutilized house and a constant fear that two families were going to show up at the beach house at the same time.

I built the first version of the online calendar system just as I finished my master's program and suddenly found that I had a ton of time on my hands. As I am writing this (Feb 2009) there are still a few reminents of the original version, but not too many. There were several facelifts but it wasn't until I hired a professional designer that I finally turned the site into something that looks like it wasn't built by a 14 year old.

The online calendar seemed to have a significant impact for my wife's family. Suddenly everyone was aware of all the free weeks at the house so people started to use the house more. My suspicion is that no one family wanted to seem greedy so they only went to the house for two weeks a year. That resulted in almost 40 weeks when the house was not used. Now people are comfortable going down more often as well as extending offers to other friends and family to use the house.

In October of 2008, I completed all of the changes necessary to support mulitple vacation homes and then officially launched the site. The two years between the initial version and the first public release was spent getting feedback from my wife's family in order to understand what works and what doesn't work. I also built a handful of other sites and took on a couple of other projects....oh ya, and went to my real job. However, at this point I am confident that if someone is looking for an online calendar to manage their vacation home, then the www.TheVacationCalendar.com is the answer.

I hope you enjoy the site. And if you don't....I would love to know what we can do to make it better.