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Hi,
I am trying to set up a B&B where a guest can choose between renting 1-2 rooms or renting the whole house (all 3 rooms).
I want to make it easy for a guest to rent the entire house — I want to avoid having them add all 3 rooms to their ‘cart,’ booking 3 rooms at once. I want the guest to book ‘Whole House’ as an a single accommodation.
This would work great with Google Calendar except for 1 issue — Google Calendar syncs too slow! I’ve read it can take 24-48 hours for the .ical from my website to update on Google Calendar.
This is how I have it set up:
1. import .ical urls (for 3 individual rooms) from website into google calendar
2. use a 3rd party app “SyncThemCalendars” to sync those 3 calendars into 1.
3. use the ical url from the 1 that is pulling the 3 urls from my website as the external calendar for the Whole House accommodation. This is so a guest cannot overbook on other guests that may have booked other rooms at the same time.I’ve tried using iCalendar (apple calendar), but I get a ‘download data isn’t valid’ error when trying to import the Motopress booking .ical url.
Does anyone know of any other alternative 3rd party calendars similar to Google Calendar that will sync faster? or am I stuck manually blocking off time for whole-house bookings?
I’d like to add more to this topic — or moreover make a suggestion for a feature.
I was able to find a way to sync my ‘whole house’ bookings with the individual rooms. It will block off days in the ‘whole house’ accommodation calendar when a single room accommodation is rented and vice versa. My solution was through Airbnb.
Airbnb has a solution for this common problem of this type of rental – where you can either choose to rent a room or two, or rent the entire house. They call it “Linked Airbnb Calendars” and its essentially nesting the rooms into a whole house calendar. Read about it here: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/1864/how-do-i-link-airbnb-calendars-for-multiple-listings
By doing this and linking each accommodations ical from Airbnb back into the plugins external links, it blocks off the rooms as needed.
Another way it could be done is by ‘aggregating’ calendars, or blocking off days based on other calendars.
Unfortunately, MotoPress support (through email) suggested I either have my guests book all 3 rooms at once. I think that is too confusing for guests to do. Or to use a 3rd party ical to sync all 3 rooms to one calendar, then back into the whole house- but if someone were to book the whole house I would have to manually block all 3 rooms for that same time.
For now, I have a solution. But if I were to stop using Airbnb in the future, this would become a problem again. I think it would be a great feature to have.
Hi Gregory,
We have this functionality on our feature request list and can notify you if it gets implemented.
However, we are working on improving our sync process for the next plugin update. The changes that we planned should let you sync the rooms to the house and vice versa automatically without involving third-party platforms. The update will be out within a couple of months.Hey Stacy,
I’m happy to hear that! I look forward to the next update. 🙂
Has this been Implemented? If so how do we access it?
Has this been implemented?
Hello Nick,
Unfortunately, this feature has not been quite popular to the date, so it has not been implemented to the plugin yet. We are collecting up-votes and will consider adding this feature in case there are more similar requests from other users.
Regards,
Andreupvote from me
Upvote here too 🙂
Hi,
We are happy to notify you that since Hotel Booking 4.10.0, it is now possible to link selected accommodations, enabling automatic blocking of linked accommodations when one is booked.
You can learn how it works by reading this post https://motopress.com/blog/linked-accommodations-in-hotel-booking-plugin-4-10-0/
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