Booking.com and Airbnb calendar sync with a WordPress booking system

If your accommodation – glamping tents, holiday cabins, guest rooms or rental flats – is on sale at the same time on your own website, Booking.com and Airbnb, a double booking is only a matter of time: the same unit sold to two guests, and one of them has to be turned away. Until then someone copies every portal booking into the other calendars by hand.

We set up your WordPress booking system to exchange iCal calendars with the portals. For every room or unit the website publishes its own iCal feed, which the portal reads at regular intervals, and imports the portal’s calendar in return. The result: a booking made on Booking.com blocks the dates on your website, and a website booking disappears from the Airbnb availability calendar without anyone touching it.

What the work includes

• Choosing or configuring the booking plugin. If the site already has a booking system, we check whether it supports iCal export and import per unit. If not, we recommend a suitable plugin or extension; we decide after reviewing your case.
• One feed per unit. For every room, tent or cabin we create a separate export URL and link it to the matching Booking.com room type or Airbnb listing. If one room type contains several identical rooms, we agree how to represent them on the portal.
• Importing the portal feeds. We attach each portal’s export link to the right unit in WordPress and schedule the import with WP-Cron or a server cron job, so that it does not depend on whether anyone happens to be visiting the site.
• Cancellations and removed events. We verify that a booking cancelled on a portal frees the dates on the website, and that a booking cancelled on the website disappears from the export feed instead of lingering in the calendar.
• Time zone and check-in/check-out. We align the time zone of WordPress, the server and the portals and check that the check-out day is free for the next guest everywhere, not a day early or a day late. This is the most common source of errors.
• A test with real reservations. We make a test booking in every channel, watch when it appears in the other calendars, cancel it and confirm that the dates are released. Only then do we call the sync working.
• Importing existing bookings. If the portals already hold future reservations, we check that they reach the website on the first import and do not collide with website bookings.
• A short guide for the host. A written guide on how to see when the last import ran, how to add a new unit or portal, and what to do if the calendars drift apart.

Typical situations

Most often the owner has a booking form on the website and separate calendars on the portals, kept in step by phone and notebook until a double booking happens at the peak of the season. The second case is a booking plugin that has iCal but either unconfigured or working in one direction only: the site imports the portals but never publishes its own bookings. The third is a sync that ‘used to work’ but now has the check-out day shifted everywhere or cancelled bookings still blocking dates. On the Ranna Surfiküla site the glamping tents run on an online booking engine with iCal calendar sync, and for Allika Pesula we built a booking engine on a separate domain.

What we need from you

• WordPress administrator access and access to the hosting or FTP for setting up the cron job.
• Access to the Booking.com extranet and the Airbnb host account, or a person who copies the iCal links from there and pastes ours in.
• A list of units and their counterparts on each portal: which room is which room type or listing.
• Check-in and check-out times and a decision on whether a cleaning day stays between two bookings.
• Permission to make test bookings and a time when the calendar can be tested without disturbing real guests.

What is not included

• Building the booking system itself or adding payments to the website – that is a separate service: booking system for WordPress.
• Syncing prices, minimum stays and availability rules: iCal carries only occupied dates, not rates. That needs a channel manager that talks to the portals through their APIs.
• Managing listing content, photos and prices on the portals, or creating the Booking.com or Airbnb account.
• Monthly monitoring of the calendars.

Who it suits

iCal sync suits a host with a few to a couple of dozen units who wants portal bookings and the website kept in step without paying a monthly fee for a channel manager. Be aware that iCal is not instant: portals read external calendars on their own schedule, usually every few hours, so a short window for a double booking remains. If you have many units, channels change often or you also need to sync prices, the next step is a channel manager with an API, which we can also connect to the website. If the site has no booking system yet, start with the booking system; if the site is slow and cron jobs keep stalling, it is worth reviewing the hosting first.