How to sync Airbnb and Booking.com calendars and stop double bookings

Why double bookings happen

When the same room is listed on Airbnb, Booking.com and your own phone diary, each place only knows its own bookings. A guest books on Airbnb, another books the same night on Booking.com, and you find out at check-in.

The fix is to let every site see the dates that are already taken somewhere else. The simplest way to do that, and the one every big booking site supports, is an iCal calendar link.

What an iCal link is

An iCal link is a web address that lists the booked and blocked dates of one room. Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo each give you one link per listing (to export their dates) and accept links from other places (to import dates).

Each site reads the other links on its own timetable, so a new booking can take a while to show up everywhere. Booking sites decide how often they read; it is often every few hours, not instantly.

Connecting the calendars, step by step

Do this once for every room or listing. In OPALSTAYS PMS it is on the Airbnb & booking sites page of your property.

• On Airbnb, open Calendar, Availability, Connect to another website, and copy the Airbnb calendar link of the listing.
• In OPALSTAYS PMS, link that room and paste the Airbnb link. Airbnb bookings now come in as reservations.
• Copy the room's own calendar address from OPALSTAYS PMS and paste it into Airbnb (Import calendar), so bookings made in OPALSTAYS close those dates on Airbnb.
• Repeat the same two-way link for Booking.com and Vrbo.
• Make a test: block a date in one place and check it closes in the others after the next sync.

What calendar sync does not do

iCal only carries dates. Prices, guest names, phone numbers and messages stay on each booking site, and changing a price in one place does not change it in another. That needs a channel manager connected through each site's own API.

Because sites read links on their own timetable, keep a small gap in mind for last-minute bookings: if a room sells on one site minutes before another site reads the calendar, the second site can still sell it. For your busiest nights, close the date by hand on the other sites as well.

When one room is booked twice anyway

OPALSTAYS PMS never moves or overwrites a booking. If a date comes in from a site while the room is already taken, it shows a warning on the Airbnb & booking sites page so you can call one guest early, offer another room and cancel on that site.