RentShortlet 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.

Airbnb synchronization does not take much time. It is a 2-phase process to make 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, your RentShortlet website downloads bookings from Airbnb through the imported links. And Airbnb downloads the bookings from your RentShortlet website 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, RentShortlet recognizes cancellation and date changes that happen on Airbnb. By the way, Airbnb also removes the imported booking automatically if it has been cancelled or removed from 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 the Airbnb calendar with your site 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 into your Airbnb account. You can read this article to find out more details on how to export Airbnb calendars 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 your RentShortlet Booking with OTA.

NB 

1. To sync with your RentShortlet website 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 maintenance mode before exporting our links to Airbnb to sync the 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.
5. 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 behaviour does not comply with the ical documentation and creates a lot of problems for owners and connected platforms.
6. RentShortlet can see that a booking (fake/real) is no longer present in the calendars that are sent to you and delete such outdated bookings from your website automatically. So you still receive these fake bookings, but your RentShortlet website 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.