How to synchronize Hotel Booking with booking.com?

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 Booking com - a travel fare aggregator website and travel metasearch engine for lodging reservations.

Sooth to say, online booking calendar sync with ical does not take much time. In short, WordPress booking plugin calendar sync is a 2-phase process:

1. you’ll need to export a calendar URL to Booking com and

2. you`ll need to 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 Booking com by the imported links. And Booking com downloads the bookings from our plugin by the exported links according to its internal schedules. In this way each online channel gets information form each other about new bookings and adds them in its system to prevent overbooking. That`s how a booking sync calendar appears. Moreover, Hotel Booking recognizes cancellation and date changes that happen on Booking com. 

Just be aware that WordPress booking calendar plugin ical sync cannot be instantaneous. Ical does not let calendars sync in real time, so individual reservations made on other platforms won’t sync immediately with your Booking com calendar, and vice versa.

To setup 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 Booking com account. You can read this article to find out more details.

In the Bookings tab → Sync Calendars hover over an accommodation and click the Edit button and insert the external links from Booking com (read more here).

Click Add New Calendar, insert your Booking com 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 Booking com account.

2. Please, note that Booking com 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 Booking com.

3. Make sure that your site is not in the maintenance mode before exporting our links to Booking com.

4. Sometimes Booking com sends bookings that are not present in the availability calendars in your Booking com account. They do it to reflect your booking rules. Fake bookings can be a result of booking rules too, 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 Booking com. We have to import everything. We would advise contacting Booking com 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 Booking com does not send them any longer.