iCal calendar sync lag results in double booking!

[Michael620]

How often does airbnb check ical feeds? And why don't they check it before someone books?! I just got a double booking becasue of this lag! My iCal feed was updated 20 minutes prior to an airbnb reservation and someone was able to book nonetheless!

How does one get answers to these questions? Why is there no 'push' for outside reservations? If they only pull the data they should make sure, they have updated data!

Anyone else having experienced this?

[David126]

I sync with my Google Calendar just to have a back up, and have noticed that it can be hours, certainly not something to rely upon to avoid double booking.

[Da4]

Hi there,

I'm new to Airbnb and channel manager stuff. So before I set everything live I actually did a lot of tests. The result is pretty horrible:

Airbnb has random delays on iCal feeds. It could be seconds or minutes or hours. So if you have multi-channels running and Airbnb is one of them, be prepared to have some double bookings. It's inevitable. 

I run my listing on book.com,  my own website www.leskiclub.com, and airbnb. Unfortunately I have to turn off instant booking on Airbnb because I really don't want to deal with double booking!

Unless someone else has a better solution, I would love to hear it.

Cheers,

Da

[Michael620]

I have started to update their calendar with my channel manager, online-booking.org in addition to having them synced via iCal. Now every new reservation is blocking theri calendar actively (rather after whatever time their system deems appropriate to run a sync..) Not having 'instant booking' active puts a real damper on reservations and adds (unwanted) work in terms of more back and forth with guests..