You let your cottage through Booking.com and Airbnb, and some guests book by other routes too. Syncing your Booking.com and Airbnb calendars through iCal makes a booked night get blocked everywhere you offer it. Without it, one moment of inattention is enough for two guests to pay for the same dates.
We go through what iCal carries, why a double booking can still happen with the sync on, how to set the calendar up and what to check afterwards. We rely only on what Chalupario can actually do today.
How Chalupario keeps one calendar for direct bookings and portals
iCal carries only occupied days, nothing more
iCal is a plain link to a calendar. Anyone who has it can download the occupied dates from it. Each entry has only a start and an end, that is the arrival and departure date.
It holds no guest name, phone, price or note. The other side learns only that those days cannot be booked. iCal creates neither a booking nor a payment, it just blocks the days.
| Booking detail | iCal carries it |
|---|---|
| Occupied days, that is arrival and departure | ✓ |
| Guest name, phone and e-mail | ✗ |
| Price and payment status | ✗ |
| Booking note and number of guests | ✗ |
| Prices and minimum length of stay | ✗ |
iCal does not sync prices, so you keep setting them in each portal separately. Chalupario has no direct connection to the portals' own interfaces yet, the sync runs through iCal.
Why a double booking can still happen with the sync on
iCal is not instant. Chalupario downloads the portals' calendars every 15 minutes, and a portal downloads yours at its own pace. Between two downloads there is a window in which one side does not yet know about a new booking on the other.
The window is short, but it is not zero. If two guests pick the same night inside it, you get a double booking. The sync makes this much less likely, but it cannot rule it out entirely.
If two bookings do land on the same dates, Chalupario notices and shows you. A red bar with a warning appears in the calendar, and an e-mail may follow. Nothing is cancelled or overwritten on its own, the decision is yours.
You set up the Booking.com and Airbnb calendar sync in two directions
A calendar is linked with two links per portal: yours for the portal, and the portal's for you.
- Open the property, the Calendar tab, and at the bottom the "Calendar sync (iCal)" card. Copy the link with the Copy button, there is no need to assemble it by hand. If you have several units, each has its own link.
- Paste it into the portal where the calendar is imported through iCal. The menu names differ between portals, look for import or calendar sync. From then on the portal reads your confirmed bookings and blocks from Chalupario.
- Then go the other way. In each portal find its calendar export link and copy it.
- Add it to Chalupario: on the same card, further down in "Calendars from portals", fill in a name, the link and optionally the unit, and press Add. The address must start with https, and a link starting with webcal should be changed to https.
One calendar is the main one, the portals read from it
Keep Chalupario as the main calendar. Enter direct bookings, manual blocks and your own stays there. The portals read from it, and you do not copy dates from system to system.
Do not enter the same dates by hand in two places. A block downloaded from a portal is read-only in Chalupario and can be released only where it came from. If you created it by hand twice, you would have to release it twice.
When a guest books directly, say through your own website, the booking shows up in the outgoing link once confirmed. The portal blocks the days only when it next downloads your link. Until then the dates are still free there, and that is exactly the window from the second section.
What to check after the sync is set up
After setup, make sure it really works before the first guest arrives. If you have several units, go through each one separately, because each has its own link and its own calendar.
- After the first download, within a quarter of an hour, the occupied days from the portals appear in the Chalupario calendar, marked with their source. If you see nothing, check the link and make sure it starts with https.
- Block one night far in the future in Chalupario and, after a while, find it as unavailable in the portal. Then remove the block again.
- In the reservation list you will find blocks as separate rows with no guest name and no price. The "Blocks" filter turns them on or off, so you can look at them separately.
- Look over the calendar for a red bar. It means two sides claim the same date.
If you ever remove a portal's link, the days already downloaded stay in the calendar, they just stop updating. You then release them one by one.
Summary
- iCal carries only occupied days, not guests or prices.
- Chalupario downloads portal calendars every 15 minutes, a portal downloads yours at its own pace.
- A double booking can arise in the gap between downloads, but Chalupario shows it to you.
- You link two directions: your link into the portal and the portal's link into Chalupario.
- Chalupario is the main calendar, the portals read from it.
- After setup, check that days really are carried over.
What to do now
- Copy the link from the "Calendar sync (iCal)" card and paste it into both portals.
- Copy the portals' export links and add them to Chalupario under "Calendars from portals".
- Block a test night and check that it shows up in both portals.
