Linking with vrbo & google calendars

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Linking with vrbo & google calendars
February 2, 2012, by dlxhivac

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It would be great if Bookerville could link its booking calendar with VRBO. Homeaway enables user to link their VRBO, Homeaway & vacationrentals.com calendars. Once the VRBO calendar was updated by Bookerville, the other 2 could be automatically updated. It would also be very nice if bookerville could link to a google calendar to allow owners & managers to better manage their properties.

17 Responses:

John Amato, February 4, 2012:

This would be fantastic, and it is a common request for all online booking engines. You should know that HomeAway now owns VRBO (as well as VacationRentals.com, CyberRentals.com, GreatRentals.com, BedandBreakfast.com, and others). It is therefore possible (albeit very difficult) for them to provide synchronization among all of these.

HomeAway

UPDATE: yes they do, please scroll and read below.

HomeAway does not currently provide a published API for other services to synchronize with their calendars, so there really is no reliable way to accomplish this. We could develop a hack to read their public calendars, but this would be very fragile: easily broken if HomeAway makes even the slightest change to how it displays their calendars. Also, it would only be one-way: we could read their calendar and try to create bookings (or booking place-holders) on your Bookerville calendar, but when new bookings are made on your Bookerville calendar, we cannot make those appear on the HomeAway calendar.

Some other services say they provide this, but I would be very leary of these claims. Some of them require you to enter your VRBO/HomeAway credentials into their system, which means that they are somehow tricking HomeAway into thinking you are signing in, and submitting new requests to make bookings there. This is walking on very thin ice - both legally and technically - and is again very fragile, as all it would take is some new features or navigation within HomeAway's internal UI to cause this synchronization "technique" to fail.

The proper way to achieve this is with a published API, and as I understand it, HomeAway does not provide this. If anyone knows otherwise, please bring it to our attention as we are willing and eager to make use of it.

Here's a topic someone posted on HomeAway's forums about it: http://community.homeaway.com/thread/2743

Google

Google does provide a published API for interfacing with their calendar, and we are looking into this now. I will post updates to this topic when we learn more.

Thanks for the thought-provoking ideas Tom.

John

dlxhivac, June 20, 2013:

Bookerville's recent offering of an ical calendar may provide an indirect way to synchronize availability calendars with Homeaway's availability calendars. I have been using my free subscription to myvrzone.com to synch my VRBO, HomeAway, Flipkey and Google calendars. Until now, I have been entering each reservation into myvrzone.com in order to populate the other calendars. Now that Bookerville provides a ical link, I can directly synch my google availability calendar and Flipkey Calendar. I changed my primary calendar in myvrzone.com to an ical type (Bookerville's) and now myvrzone.com will synch Bookerville's ical calendar with my VRBO and HomeAway calendars FOR FREE! This is a free work around until Bookerville finds a way to synch their calendar with the HomeAway family of calendars directly.
I just made this change and will have to compare my calendars in a few days in order to be sure that they are all properly synched with Bookerville.

John Amato, January 20, 2014:

Indeed. Bookerville's iCal Export feature can help a great deal with any listing sites or calendars which offer the ability to import and/or synchronize with iCal feeds.

FlipKey - all you have to do is copy and paste your Bookerville iCal Export URL into the field in your FlipKey account, and they will automatically read your Bookerville calendar and make updates. (Nice huh?) They stated that they do this only once a day, but in reality we believe they are sync'ing several times per day. Here is a topic on Synchronizing FlipKey with Bookerville. If someone could provide some screen-captures of the process to do this in FlipKey, we will be happy to update that topic, to make it into a full-blown tutorial (like the AirBnB one below) for all to use.

AirBnB - AirBnB also reads iCal feeds, and we have at least one customer using it, and verified recently that it works. Learn more: Synchronize AirBnB Calendars with Bookerville.

Google - Google claims that their calendar will read an iCal format feed. Can anyone verify this for us? Also - is it just a one-time, or manual read? Or will it do periodic updates after the initial read?

Note: Bookerville is also in talks with a 3rd-party service to provide a wider range of calendar-sync'ing features. Stay tuned...

marniewc, May 19, 2014:

I just uploaded our iCal into FlipKey and it works great. Fingers crossed that HomeAway will 'get it together'. Thanks!!

pch, May 23, 2015:

What is the status of this? I would love to have my bookings that are created in Bookerville automatically populate my VRBO calendar. Is this possible?

John Amato, August 28, 2015:

Well race-fans, it now appears that there are at least two (and a 3rd coming) ways to achieve this:

1) VRBO (HomeAway) looks like they are now willing to read iCal feeds, so you could copy & paste your Bookerville iCal export URL into your VRBO account, and they claim they will read it "hourly".

Learn more: HomeAway/VRBO iCal synchronization

2) If you haven't noticed yet, there is a check-box in your Bookerville Property Setup page that lets you paste in your VRBO iCal feed URL, and Bookerville will then start reading it every night, blocking corresponding dates on your Bookerville calendar.

and...

3) We believe that BookingPal (our channel manager partner) will be integrated with HomeAway/VRBO in the near future. This will provide much more than merely calendar sync - you'll be able to completely manage all your properties in Bookerville and have the data pushed out to multiple listing sites - property features/amenities, rates, taxes, photos, and more.

Learn More: BookingPal and Bookerville.

So finally, some options!

pch, September 20, 2015:

The iCal feed to VRBO works Great! Thanks. Now if VRBO would also bring in the reservation information or let me open the booking and edit it that would be fantastic but I don't think we will see that from them. That is not a problem. 99% of all of our bookings are done through your great Bookerville software.

gmanobmo, March 21, 2016:

Our Bookerville ical calendars seem to work as they should with Flipkey and Homeaway. However, with our Google calendar it adds an extra day / night to every booking.

Any ideas?

gmanobmo, March 30, 2016:

We shared our Bookerville iCal with HomeAway (a couple of weeks ago) and I just checked my HomeAway calendars and they show they were last updated on March 24th (today is March 30th). How can we make the HomeAway calendar show it's been updated daily without having to do it manually?

Thanks.

John Amato, March 30, 2016:

Hi gmanobmo - I don't know. Since that is a HomeAway feature, only HomeAway can control it, so I would contact them and ask why it is updating so rarely. Most managers report that VRBO updates calendars from iCal feeds several times a day, so it is a bit perplexing; I wonder if they're having some trouble?

dlxhivac, April 21, 2016:

I am having trouble synching my Bookerville calendar with VRBO/HomeAway.
I use both of these methods:
copy & paste my Bookerville iCal export URL into myVRBO account.
I pasted my VRBO iCal feed URL into the check-box in my Bookerville Property Setup page.

I have bookings that are not showing up in VRBO/HomeAway Calendar.

John Amato, April 21, 2016:

Only HomeAway can make bookings from Bookerville appear on the HomeAway (and/or VRBO) calendar.

Have you verified that the missing booking is in fact on your Bookerville iCal feed?

John

dlxhivac, April 21, 2016:

I had previously pasted my homeaway ical feed url into the Check-box in my bookerville set up page. Both the VRBO and Homeaway calendar pages have the bookerville ical info pasted into their calendar pages.
How do I verify that the missing booking are in my bookerville ical feed?

dlxhivac, April 21, 2016:

I figured out how to view the ical on one of my google calendars and the bookings missing from Homeaway/VRBO are present in my bookerville ical. They are also present in my Flipkey calendar which has been synched to bookerville, as well.

John Amato, April 21, 2016:

So it sure looks like HomeAway/VRBO is just having some trouble with their iCal reader, right?

Another way to view your Bookerville iCal feed is to go get the URL to it from your Property Setup page, upper-right area, and just copy and paste that into the "location" field at the top of your browser. It should display the iCal feed to you, or pop it open in a text window.

dlxhivac, April 21, 2016:

I called Homeaway and the first person that I spoke with was clueless and reluctant to transfer me to an upper level support person. When I finally reached a tech support person, he couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. He then deleted the Bookerville ical URL and reentered it. Then when we refreshed our homeaway calendar pages, it did synch properly. He explained that it had to do with a cache that was being used and not working properly. By deleting the bookervilled ical link then reentering it, it deleted the cache and supposedly will now work properly.
Anyone who sees that their bookerville calendar is not synching properly with VRBO/HomeAway should try this solution to see if a faulty cache is the cause.

John Amato, April 21, 2016:

Thanks for the update.

As much as I'm tempted to lay into HomeAway's tech team, I do understand that software, especially in this modern, web-connected world, can be murderously difficult to get right.

Hopefully they are correcting it...

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