The Hotel Booking plugin supports the international standard of calendar synchronization (import/export) - iCalendar (iCal). This format is also supported by most online booking platforms including Airbnb (to import / export airbnb calendar) - an American online marketplace and hospitality service brokerage company.
Actually, Airbnb WordPress plugin synchronization does not take much time. It is a 2-phase process to make WordPress Airbnb integration:
1. you have to export a calendar URL to Airbnb and
2. to import the link from them to your website (to notify your site about the bookings made through Airbnb).
Airbnb article on how to import and export bookings
During synchronization, the Hotel Booking plugin downloads bookings from Airbnb by the imported links. And Airbnb downloads the bookings from our plugin by the exported links according to its internal schedules. In this way, each online channel gets information from each other about new bookings and adds them to its system to prevent overbooking.
Moreover, Hotel Booking recognizes cancellation and date changes that happen on Airbnb. By the way, Airbnb also removes the imported booking automatically if it has been canceled or removed on your site.
Just be aware that ical does not let calendars sync in real-time, so individual reservations made on other platforms won’t share Airbnb calendar with your one immediately, and vice versa. It can take from 15 minutes to a few hours.
To set up synchronization of your bookings, go to the Bookings tab → Sync Calendars. There you will see a list of all your accommodations with their unique URLs (the link in the Export column):
All the links from the Export column can be imported in you Airbnb account. You can read this article to find out more details on how to export Airbnb calendar and the like.
In the Bookings tab → Sync Calendars hover over an accommodation and click the Edit button and insert the external links from Airbnb (read more here).
Click Add New Calendar, insert your Airbnb link and Update to save the changes:
Once both your platforms are crosslinked, you can synchronize the bookings manually or enable the automatic sync. To manually sync only a specific accommodation, 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?
Here is also the video tutorial about how to sync Hotel Booking with OTA.
NB
1. To sync with our plugin you should have a unique URL for every accommodation from your Airbnb account.
2. Please, note that Airbnb 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 Airbnb.
3. Make sure that your site is not in the maintenance mode before exporting our links to Airbnb to sync Airbnb calendar.
4. Sometimes Airbnb sends bookings that are not present in the availability calendars in your Airbnb account. They do it to reflect your booking rules, e.g. booking window, or if the checkout day of one booking cannot be the check-in day of another booking, etc.
Unfortunately, we cannot ignore such fake bookings because there is no difference between fake and real bookings in the calendars that are sent by Airbnb. We have to import everything. We would advise contacting Airbnb in case you will get such fake bookings. This behavior does not comply with the ical documentation and creates a lot of problems for owners and connected platforms.
Since a recent update (3.5.1) of Hotel Booking, our plugin can see that a booking (fake/real) is no longer present in the calendars that are sent to you and deletes such outdated bookings from your website automatically. So you still receive these fake bookings, but our plugin removes them for you every day if Airbnb does not send them any longer.
You can also find more information on how to sync vrbo and airbnb calendars, Hotel Booking with booking com and other booking platforms in our articles.
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