What iCal sync does
Checkinea can watch a listing's calendar export from Airbnb, Booking.com, or Vrbo and automatically detect new stays — you don't have to enter them by hand. Because an iCal feed only carries dates and a booking reference, never guest names or contact details, a stay that arrives this way shows up as a "booking candidate" first. You confirm it and add the missing guest details before Checkinea can file it with SES. Read more in Booking candidates.
Where to find your calendar export link
Menus move around on OTA sites from time to time, so treat these as a starting point rather than exact, permanent steps.
Airbnb
- Go to Calendar.
- Open Availability settings.
- Find Connect to another website (calendar sync) and copy the export link shown there.
Booking.com
- Log in to the extranet.
- Go to Calendar & Pricing and open Sync calendars.
- Click Connect a calendar. If you have nothing to import, click Skip to export and give the connection a name.
- Copy the export link. It starts with
https://ical.booking.com/.
Vrbo
- Go to Calendar.
- Open Import & Export.
- Choose Export calendar and copy the link.
Every one of these links ends in .ics and is private to your listing —
anyone with the link can see your booked dates, so treat it like a password
and don't share it publicly.
Connecting it in Checkinea
- Open the property, then go to its Channels tab.
- Open Connect a channel.
- Pick the Channel (Airbnb, Booking.com, or Vrbo) and paste the export link into the iCal link field.
- Press Connect. Checkinea checks the feed right away and reports whether it found any bookings.
How often Checkinea checks the feed
After the first check, Checkinea polls each connected feed every 30 minutes.
Airbnb and Vrbo: if a stay is removed from the calendar before check-in, Checkinea only cancels it once it has stayed missing from the feed for two hours in a row. A stay that reappears within that window is left alone and never gets cancelled. If a single check finds the whole calendar empty, with every one of your upcoming stays on that connection missing at once, Checkinea treats that as a broken export rather than a wave of cancellations: nothing is cancelled, and the channel shows a Feed incomplete badge until the export starts listing your bookings again. This only affects future stays from that connection; stays that have already passed are left alone.
Booking.com: the feed never cancels a booking, no matter how long it stays missing. A missing stay only shows the Feed incomplete badge — a hint to check, not a cancellation. Booking.com cancellations reach Checkinea through its cancellation email instead — see Auto-import bookings by forwarding OTA emails. Without email forwarding set up, cancel a Booking.com booking yourself from its detail page in Checkinea.
Troubleshooting
The link isn't accepted. Make sure you copied the calendar export
link (it ends in .ics), not the public URL of your listing page — those
look similar but only the export link works.
No bookings are appearing. Give it a few minutes for the first sync, and up to 30 minutes for anything added afterwards. Check the channel's status badge in the Channels tab — an error badge means the feed URL is no longer valid and needs to be reconnected. A Feed incomplete badge means the feed loaded but stopped listing some of your upcoming bookings. For Airbnb and Vrbo, check the export and cancel any bookings yourself if they were genuinely cancelled. For Booking.com, the feed itself never cancels — check its cancellation email arrived (see email forwarding) or cancel the booking yourself.