Hotel Booking plugin supports the international standard of calendar synchronization (import/export) - iCalendar (iCal). This format is also supported by most online booking platforms like Airbnb, VRBO, etc. You may need to contact the platform that you are interested in to be sure that the ical sync is available in your account.
In short, setting up synchronization is a 2-phase process: you’ll need to export a calendar URL to an external channel/channels (to notify them about the bookings made through your site) and import the link from them to your site (to notify your site about the bookings made through the channels).
During synchronization, Hotel Booking plugin downloads bookings from external booking platforms (Airbnb, VRBO, etc.) by the imported links. And all other external channels download the bookings from our plugin by the exported links according to their internal schedules. Thus each online channel gets information form each other about new bookings and creates them in its system to prevent overbooking.
To configure synchronization of your bookings, go to the Bookings tab → Sync Calendars. You’ll see a list of all your real accommodations with their unique URLs (the link in the Export column):
Click the Edit button and insert the external links provided by external booking platforms.
Click Add New Calendar and insert all the external links (no limitation) and Update to save the changes:
Now you can export the internal calendar links of your website (the Export column) to other booking platforms following their instructions, e.g:
How to import and export Calendars on Booking.com
How to import and export Airbnb calendars
How to import and export VRBO / HomeAway calendars
Once all your platforms are crosslinked, you can synchronize the bookings manually or enable the automatic sync. To manually sync only a specific accommodation across the channels, click ‘Sync external calendars’ only under this particular accommodation. To synchronize all calendars for all accommodations, click on the ‘Sync all external calendars’ button:
This article describes in detail how to enable automatic synchronization on your website:
Is synchronization automatic?
NB
1 Please, note that other booking platforms may not accept the link if there is no booking in the link. In this way, you should add at least 1 booking of the accommodation and import the link again on other booking platforms.
2. Make sure that your site is not in the maintenance mode before exporting our links to other booking platforms.
Comments
10 comments
Hi,
I've seen that only confirmed bookings will sync over externar sources. Is there a way to make "pending payment" or other states appear on syncronization?
Thanks
Solved: adding the desired statuses in export.php:
Hi Nido,
Thank you for finding a solution!
I have a small cottage (1 accommodation type) because you can only rent the cottage to one person at a time. How do I link multiple external calendars to 1 accommodation type? I assume I just add in all three external calendars to the accommodation. (See screenshot).
Also, when the reservations are synced, the contact information are not being synced from external to WordPress site. And it show a payment of $100 which is wrong.
Lastly, across all 3 external calendars there are 98 bookings, but none are synced successfully.
Hi,
Yes, you added external calendars properly. The price and other information is not exported from other platforms so there is applied base price for each booking and some other information is missing. The main purpose of iCal import/export is to avoid overbooking.
As for the error during importing calendars its says that you try to import form .XLSX file however plugin expects ICAL or ICS file. Could you submit a request so we'll be able to check it out for you?
Hi, when I copy paste my calendar URL to Booking.com (mydomain.com/?feed=mphb.ics&accommodation_id=123), I have this error message :
"This is not a valid iCal URL. Please try again."
How to preceed please ? Thanks !
Eric
Probably there was Coming Soon mode enabled. Let us know if you managed to link iCal import/export.
It was the problem ! thanks a lot !
iCal synch is good. XML synch is far better because real-time. Does Villagio theme compatible with an XML synch solution such as Beds24 and other XML booking synch tool ? Thks.
Hi Franck,
There is used the same Hotel Booking plugin in all our rental themes and it support import/exportin iCal format only at the moment.
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