Got a reservation, but calendar was closed on these dates..

Got a reservation, but calendar was closed on these dates..

Hi there!

 

I just had a very interesting case...

I use Booking.com and Airbnb sites and both calendars are automatically syncronized. If I will get a reservation from Booking.com, these dates will go automatically blocked on Airbnb  etc.

 

Just got a reservation from Airbnb guest and then I discovered that I already have a reservation on exactly the same dates on Booking.com system, got this reservation 3 month ago.

Did not understand at all how this could happen. Thought that ok, maybe these dates were somehow still open and asked guest kindly to cancel this reservation, so she did it. I was ready to block quickly these dates in Airbnb and saw that these dates are closed and there is Booking.com reservation.

How the hell she could make a reservation?? These dates were closed all the time... Went and tried to see my apartment on Airbnb site as a guest which dates are free and which are closed. These dates are closed, dont understand how she could make a reservation then. 

 

During 5 years never this kind of thing happened... Does it happen with someone? Little bit scary now, dont want that this would happen again....

12 Replies 12
Karyn45
Level 1
Wales, United Kingdom

I just had the same issue but I caught it before I got a double booking - I live in fear of them!  Up until today my Airbnb and Booking.com calendars sync'd with no problems.  Today all my booking.com reservations disappeared from my Airbnb availability calendar.  I have reinstalled the sync links, resync'd, imported, exported and generally faffed around and it still doesn't work.  As a result I have had to remove instant booking from my AirBnB listings until I can get this sorted as I am not running the risk of being double booked. 

 

If I find a solution or explanation I will share it.

 

Karyn

Zoltán14
Level 2
Brașov, Romania

Karyn, same thing happened to me today! Just about an hour ago i noticed it. Tried everything, like you, nothing helps. Called AirBNB, didn't solve anything, all i get was an expensive phone call (i'm not from the USA) and a reassuring that if a double booking should happen they will wave the penalty fees for cancelling. Nevertheless I turned off instant booking as well, since there really isn't much i can do, i have tons of booking.com reservations for the following weeks/months.

I hope they fix it soon, although i don't rejoice that other are in the same situation at least i know it's not only me, so it must be a system failure at AirBNB.

Michal1
Level 2
Prague, Czech Republic

Hi, same here - problem is on booking.com side. Try download that ics file - simply put url from booking com export link to browser - and inside ics file is only header, no events ...

 

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Booking.com, b.v.//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
END:VCALENDAR

 

I had to also disable instant booking on Airbnb temporarily and wrote to booking.com to fix it.

I got only 1 double booking, but this issue will cause disaster as it seems that it is a worldwide problem...

 

Michal

Oh wow! Thanks for helping resolve the problem! I blocked manually on Airbnb the dates that were booked on Booking.com but I kept instant booking on Airbnb and I’ll check my emails often so as soon as I will receive a booking I’ll immediately block the dates manually but booking.com should fix this problem ASAP !!

Michal1
Level 2
Prague, Czech Republic

I would rather switch instant booking off or close everything on booking.com until this is fixed. You cannot monitor everything manually 24/7. Dealing with double booking is not pleasant.

Zoltán14
Level 2
Brașov, Romania

It started working for me, do a manual sync and see if it's ok for you as well. No need to delete/reimport the booking.com ics file.

Regina273
Level 2
Westport, Ireland

Tried to sync from AirBnB calendar to no avail, then I synced booking.com and it worked.

Thanks Zoltan

Michal1
Level 2
Prague, Czech Republic

It is working for me now as well - I have called with booking.com - they confirm that this was reported to them also from other unhappy users. Hope it is fixed permanently.

 

Anyway it was last drop and I am now in process of researching more robust solution like channel manager as simple sync using ical is always risk of double bookings as it runs only periodically (nobody knows how often).

 

Hi Michal.

 

1. First, great work with detecting where the problem was, thank you for that. 

2. Second, i don't think a channel manager can solve this kind of issues. If the calendar file of the provider is broken, or their service has glitches then the channel manager software will inherit the same problem. Just think about this recent outage: the channel manager queries booking.com's ics file, sees it is empty, updates airbnb accordingly by deleting all previous dates. The channel manager can't possibly know that it is a software error or you simply deleted all dates. These extreme problems however seem to be extremely rare, thankfully. 

3. A much more dangerous and common situation is when the calendars sync, but not quick enough. I really have no clue how often they sync, i would have assumed that it happens at every change, where a change means a new reservation or cancelling. As far as i can see this is not how it happens, most probably because there is such a big flux of data so probably there is a prioritization or queing of data so as to not overwhelm the hardware infrastructure of the provider. Which leaves us in danger, because if the sync occurs only after a few hours there is a high chance of double booking.

 

So that  basically leaves us with three options:

1. I am using Airbnb and Booking as well and i have grown into the habit of manually syncing the calendars after each new reservation. It only takes like 30 seconds. Especially if you have only two-three calendars to sync i think it is the best - and by far the cheapest - approach. You can instantly see if someything is wrong. And if you use aribnb/booking on a regular basis keeping an eye on these things is mandatory. There are certain things that simply can't be automated and be 100% failsafe.

2. If you are a bit technically savvy you could try to sync airbnb/booking with google calendar then write a short query using the API explorer that would interrogate the calendar on a regular basis for a certain string. Thus, if the calendar changes (for instance you had a reservation for the dates XYZ and they are not there anymore) you could get a notification and you would have to look into the problem. I used a similar, but a bit more primitive approach when this whole thing with booking.com happened that gave me enough time to react before any double bookings were made.

3. A combination of the two above is my safest bet. There is no 100% perfect failsafe system and manual check can't be completely removed. 

 

Obviously there are many people for whom all this is science fiction because they simply are not technically inclined (well, except for the manual sync, which is really a no brainer). They are way better off using a third party software as a channel manager and that's it, BUT they must realize that bad things can happen nonetheless and that if you are trying to run a hospitality business then you must dedicate yourself to it.  So yes, pick up the **bleep** phone or open the **bleep** site a few times a day even if apparently there is no reason, just to check if everything is all right. If you can do it with that piece of crap Facebook or other social network that are just for fun why don't you do it for something that actually brings you money?

@Zoltán14I stumbled on Airbnb's sync limits a few weeks ago here https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/1295/what-are-airbnb-s-calendar-sync-rate-limits

 

Here is the entire text of the article:  "The rate limit for third-party calendar applications and services is 80 requests per minute per IP. If you get a 429 error (Calendar sync too frequently), you’re hitting the rate limit and you should slow down your requests, spread them more evenly across the hour, or retry the request the next hour."

 

Eighty requests per minute PER IP.  Why don't I believe that's actually the rate?

Hi @Ann0.

 

Thank you for the info. It may be correct, who knows. These requests are from the direction of third party calendars (eg. booking.com, homeaway etc) and it all boils down to how many IP's they have. If we take ONLY booking.com and we assume they have 1000 public IP's (which is A LOT) and they all query simultaneously AirBNB's databases that would be 80000 allowed requests per minute. Let's talk sci-fi and say booking.com has 10k public IP's, that would be 800k allowed requests per minute. Far far away from the total of 27 million total reported listings that booking.com has. Even if half that and we assume that only half of the listings on booking.com also are on AirBNB that still leaves us with 13 million queries per minute. Ok, let's say only a quarter of listings are on both sites, that still is more than 7 million. And if we start taking in consideration other sites as well (homeaway, expedia, tripadvisor, even google) the number just keeps growing by the hundreds of thousands, if not more.

I just checked and Booking.com last updated it's calendar with AirBNB's records more than 10 hours ago. So yeah...

 

I still think that the best approach (well, at least for me) is to manually run the sync whenever somewhere something changes combining that with keeping an eye at least twice daily on the calendars. As long as they show the bookings from other sites as well i have no reason to worry. 

hey zoltan how do you manual sync? 

 

syncing from airbnb to booking works for me. i just refresh on booking and it updates.

but when i close a date on booking it doesnt update on airbnb page