For Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo hosts
Stop double-booking your rental — without paying for a channel manager
If you list the same place on Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo, none of them tell the others when a guest books. You block the dates by hand, and the one time you forget costs you a refunded payout and a penalty. Channel managers fix this for $30–60 a month, which is hard to justify for one or two units. iCal Merge does just this part: merging is free, and a loop-safe feed for each channel plus the host tools are $5 a month.
How it works
- Paste each channel's calendar link. Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo each export an iCal link for a listing. Add them to one iCal Merge calendar.
- You get one merged calendar. Every booking from every channel, with the channel's name in front of it, on a single link that updates itself.
- Give each channel its own feed. Airbnb imports a feed with your Booking.com and Vrbo bookings, Booking.com one with Airbnb and Vrbo, and so on. Each channel blocks the nights the others have booked. No more blocking dates by hand.
Loop prevention, built in. No channel is ever sent its own bookings back. Import one combined feed everywhere and each channel receives its own reservations as outside blocks; when a guest cancels, the night can stay blocked until the channel next reads the feed. A feed per channel leaves that loop out, and if a channel is already importing your combined link, your calendar page flags it and we email you the fix.
Sync health you can see. Each channel's link shows whether it is still updating, so a broken or revoked link turns up on your calendar page instead of as a double booking.
Worth being straight about the limit: channels read imported calendars on their own schedule, usually every few hours. Any iCal-based tool, this one included, narrows the double-booking window rather than closing it completely. Anyone promising real-time is overselling.
Step-by-step guide with the export and import screens for each channel
What Pro adds for hosts
- A feed for each channel, in one click. One link per platform, each without that platform's own bookings, so nothing loops back, and a note on where to paste each one.
- Double-booking alerts. When two channels claim the same night, you get an email, one per clash, before it turns into a cancelled stay and a penalty.
- Turnover buffer days. Block one or more days after each checkout so a back-to-back booking can't strand your cleaner.
- A schedule for your cleaner. A separate link that turns each checkout into a "Clean" task. No guest names, nothing private.
Pricing
$5/monthor $4.17/month billed annually
Merging is free for one calendar with up to three feeds. Pro covers up to 10 calendars, one per property, and adds the per-channel feeds and host tools above. For comparison: one prevented double-booking usually covers a year or more of it, and a channel manager runs $360–720 a year.