Airbnb iCal ICS sync issue

[Thomas Kolnowski]

Thank you for the reply, Mr. Davis. The problem is that these “Airbnb (Not available)” transactions remain on the calendar for 12 hours – in our case, they appear at 12:01 PM each day and don’t get removed until 12:01 AM the following day when Airbnb finally removes the blocks from their native calendar. Then of course they immediately re-appear the next day.

Again this causes our hotelier issues every day since he must individually examine each new booking on the MotoPress admin calendar to see if it is legitimate. Please see a portion of our admin calendar at the moment in this image:

screen shot 04-16-2020

Here, Bookings 17017, 17019, 17111, 17115, and 17113 are all “Airbnb (Not available)” transactions.

I am pleading again on behalf of our hotelier client for you to consider one of the following enhancements:

1) Provide an option in MotoPress > Accommodation > Settings to Exclude all “Airbnb (Not available)” transactions from generating the MotoPress calendar. In other words, ignore these when the iCalendar file is parsed.

2) Import the “Airbnb (Not available)” transactions, but code them with a different color or special text on the MotoPress admin calendar so they are immediately recognizable by the hotelier staff.

Thank you again.

Thomas Kolnowski
Digitized House Media, LLC

[J. Davis]

Hi Arslan,

Thank you for your question. In order to delete the imported bookings you may navigate to Dashboard > Booking > All Bookings > Imported (tab) > select all bookings and Bulk Delete the booking page by page. You will also need to remove them from the trash after you delete all the imported bookings.

best regards,
J. Davis

[J. Davis]

Hi Thomas,

Thank you for your feedback. Have you checked whether there is a possibility to exclude such bookings from ical file on the side of Airbnb? Probably there is some kind of toggle to exclude such blocks?
We may check if it is possible to style such bookings into a different color. Could you submit a request to our support team referring to this topic?

Best regards,
J. Davis

[Thomas Kolnowski]

Thanks again for your reply, Mr. Davis. No, there is no setting from the Airbnb side to exclude such bookings from their iCal export. We have done exhaustive research on that and can confirm there are no definitely no settings in Airbnb.

I will proceed with logging a support request on the topic per your suggestion.

Best,
Thomas Kolnowski
Digitized House Media, LLC

[Thomas Kolnowski]

Mr. Davis – please see new Support Request:

https://support.motopress.com/hc/en-us/requests/26395

Best,
Thomas Kolnowski

[Andre Flores]

Hi, Thomas!

Thank you, your request has been received and is currently under investigation. We will provide you with further updates in submitted ticket.

Regards,
Andre

[Jonathan]

Following. We currently are having this exact same issue with AirBnB calendar syncing. What was the resolution here?

[Thomas Kolnowski]

Hi, Johnathan. We have developed a CSS workaround here for our hotelier clients that may of use to you. It styles Airbnb “Not Available” bookings (and other OTA bookings) with special shading and text.

See this thread we published:

Feature request: Shading or Different Colors for Imported Bookings

Best,
Thomas Kolnowski
Digitized House Media, LLC

[Jonathan]

Thank you, but a CSS-only workaround is not a solution as the room dates become unbookable for guests on our website due to AirBnBs ical import. So it’s more that just styling them differently for the admin calendar view. Will continue with other ideas.

[J. Davis]

Hi Jonathan,

Thank you for your question. Airbnb blocks some days in the calendar when you set up Availability settings. Thus Airbnb adds the blocked dates to ical file to inform other platforms that those dates should be blocked. That’s why other platforms also get such dates as blocked and so you have the same calendar on all the platforms.
Our plugin just imports all the bookings that are stored in iCal files that Airbnb generates. If you think that your availability configuration added via the Airbnb account should not be reflected in the ical file, then you should contact Airbnb and ask them not to add such events to the ical file.

best regards,
J. Davis

[Thomas Kolnowski]

Hi, Jonathan – I understand your frustration with the Airbnb events import. With our hotelier clients, we have found we can eliminate the “Airbnb (Not available)” events getting imported to MHB by adjusting the the settings for the individual accommodations in Airbnb.

You can do this by going to Availability > Reservation Preferences then setting the “Advance Notice” = Same Day by 12:00 AM and Preparation Time = None.

This setting works fine for accommodations where there is no prep time required (e.g., camp site or caravan site).

Hope this helps!

Best,
Thomas Kolnowski
Digitized House Media, LLC (Austin, Texas USA)

[J. Davis]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for your help. Your Airbnb experience is much appreciated.

best regards,
J. Davis

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