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How to Use iCal to Sync Vacation Rental Calendars

In the vacation rental industry, all the major listing sites and OTAs use the iCal format, including: Airbnb,, Homeaway (VRBO, Stayz), Expedia, Tripadvisor (FlipKey, HolidayLettings, HouseTrip, VacationRentals), CanadaStays, Homestay, Agoda, 9Flats, Wimdu, and many others. The iCal format is widely used and supported by many different products, including Google Calendar, Apple/iOS/iCloud Calendar (formerly called iCal, which is admittedly confusing), and Microsoft Outlook. It was created to “provide the definition of a common format for openly exchanging calendaring and scheduling information across the Internet.” ( Wikipedia) ics) that allows users to store and exchange calendaring and scheduling information (e.g. ICalendar (or shortened, iCal) is a standard file type (usually. But if this fits in your workflow, this is an option you can consider to prevent double bookings. This is a time-consuming process, especially if you are getting frequent bookings and listing on several channels. If you are manually approving each booking (rather than using Instant Book), you can simply go into your other calendars and block the dates before approving a new booking. Manually Updating Your Vacation Rental Calendars Let’s take a look at each of these options in more detail.

Using a Channel Manager – Real-time syncing, convenient, and requires a paid subscription to a vacation rental management software (see our favorite channel managers).

Using iCal – Easy to set up, free, supported by all the major listing sites, but has a possible time delay of up to a few hours.

Manually Updating – Time-consuming and difficult to manage if you’re using Instant Book, but ensures no double bookings.

You might also end up using some combination of these. There are 3 main ways to keep all your short-term rental calendars in sync. How to Keep Your Vacation Rental Calendars in Sync Here’s what you need to know about vacation rental calendar synchronization. But it also requires that you keep all your calendars in sync, in order to avoid double bookings. Listing your vacation rental on multiple channels can be a great way to get more eyes on your listing, and get more bookings.