Most hosts tend to have their listings listed on more than one online booking site, which is certainly a good idea! It ensures that more target audiences are able to reach your properties, which will increase the chances of getting bookings. But, syncing calendars is really a challenge!
As an Airbnb host, you must have a lot on your plate – you have to respond to guest messages, make sure the house is clean, get ready for the next guests, and you also have to sync calendars to ensure that the same property is not booked multiple times on the same date. If you manage more than one calendar at the same time, such as Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com, it’s easy for things to get out of hand quickly.
Fortunately, there are ways to hook up all of these calendars together to make them more manageable. This article will show you how to sync your Airbnb calendar with VRBO and Booking.com!
Sync Calendars Manually
Some newbie short-term rental hosts may do a manual sync through an Excel spreadsheet in the initial stages, which doesn’t seem too difficult. However, you’ll soon find that this simply doesn’t work.
That is mainly because changes to the channel calendars are unpredictable and take place 24/7 – there is no way you can manually update the spreadsheet in real-time, even if you don’t sleep. And as long as it’s manual there are inevitably mistakes, which can also cause chaos in the calendars.
All of this leads directly to the risk of double booking, which can be a futile exercise.
Sync Calendars Through iCal
iCal is a calendar synchronization tool. You can use it to sync multiple calendars together to avoid double bookings on the same date.
For example, once an Airbnb calendar is linked to a VRBO calendar through iCal, when a guest books a date at Airbnb, the Airbnb calendar will close that date, and the iCal calendar will change the same way, and then send VRBO the data, whose calendar will also automatically become unavailable.
How To Sync Calendars With iCal
When you have your properties listed on different OTA websites, it’s just a few simple steps to sync calendars via iCal.
- Go to the channel calendar and find the iCal link for a listing
- Copy the iCal link from one of the channels and paste it into the “Import Calendar” of several other channels
- If you have multiple listings, repeat the above for each listing
- Save your settings in all calendars.
Pros and cons of iCal
There’s no need to say what’s great about iCal, it’s free! You don’t need to spend a single penny on this synchronization tool.
But the biggest downside of syncing calendars with iCal is that you have to remember to do it. Because the API used to sync calendars does not update in real time. You may find that you have to refresh the calendars for each property each time a booking is made in order.
There is a 30-120-minute delay in iCal’s auto-sync, which is designed to prevent too many requests from happening in a short period of time. So if you don’t manually refresh in time, there is a high risk of double bookings.
iCal also doesn’t sync reservation details, messages & inquiries, and guest reviews, etc., which means that even if you sync your calendar across channels with iCal, you still need to log into each platform to manage things other than your calendar, which doesn’t really save much effort.
Sync Calendars With Vacation Rental Management Software
The most effective way recognized by hosts for syncing multiple calendars, is to use property management software, such as Hostex. As a professional short-term rental management platform, Hostex allows synchronization across all channels, your room availabilities, prices, and bookings can all be viewed on one calendar; and it’s automatic, with no manual operation required at all.
Once you connect your listings from each channel to Hostex, you don’t have to visit the channel websites anymore, and all operations, including changing prices, replying to messages, sending reviews, and adjusting inventory, can be done in Hostex in one stop.
Hostex also offers great automated features such as automatic reply, automatic check-in guide, automatic reviews, automatic cleaning tasks, and automatic price changes, and we’re constantly exploring more possibilities to make short-term rental management a real piece of cake!
If you’d like to experience how Hostex can help you grow your business, just log into Hostex.io and give it a try!
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