Here are the top tips to synchronize and coordinate your calendars seamlessly.
Maintain up-to-date availability
Keep your finger on the pulse. Regularly review and update your availability calendar to reflect last-minute changes, maintenance schedules, or personal plans. Set aside a recurring block of time to stay on top of these updates and ensure your listing is always accurate.
Tailor the experience. Fine-tune your booking settings, such as minimum stay requirements, pricing, and cancellation policies, to create the perfect balance between attracting guests and upholding your own peace of mind.
Efficiently manage guest inquiries & bookings
Responding promptly to guest inquiries and booking requests is a hallmark of top-notch guest service. Use your calendar to keep track of upcoming reservations and any special requests or needs from your guests.
Leverage automation
A key way to be more efficient—automate as much as you can. Explore the powerful calendar management tools and features offered by Airbnb, Vrbo, and other vacation rental platforms. From automated pricing adjustments to templates for communicating with guests, these tools can streamline your workflow and free up your time.
Managing multiple listings
Have a growing portfolio of vacation rental properties? Then it’s even more critical to stay organized and keep your calendars synchronized. Consider investing in a property management system or calendar integration tool so you can coordinate all of your listings from one screen.
Turn to the pros for calendar management
Do you want your multiple calendars to be completely effortless and chaos-free? Hand them over to a full-service vacation rental manager, like Vacasa.
This can be a game-changer. Vacasa will not only sync, optimize, and manage all of your calendars, but we’ll keep all your property information consistent across multiple platforms. This includes:
Airbnb, Inc. (/ˌɛərˌbiːɛnˈbiː/ AIR-BEE-en-BEE) is an American company operating an online marketplace for short-and-long-term homestays and experiences in various countries and regions. The company acts as a broker and charges a commission from each booking.
, go to your listing's Pricing and Availability section, then Calendar Sync. Copy the iCal link and paste it into Vrbo's Import Calendar feature. Repeat the process to import your Vrbo calendar into Airbnb.
Recommended choice: Use Hostaway's channel manager
Highly reliable and easy to use, Hostaway's channel manager offers a robust 2-way API connection to all major OTAs, updating reservation data in real-time and preventing double bookings.
In order to keep your calendars on Airbnb and Vrbo up-to-date with each other, you'll need to export your calendar from each platform and then import it on the other platform. If you're listed on both then this process is repeated twice to make sure that both calendars are synced correctly.
Listing your vacation rentals on both Airbnb and Vrbo gives you access to a larger pool of potential guests. More potential guests means you'll probably get more reservations, which will lower your vacancy rate. But there are other advantages to listing on both sites besides boosting occupancy.
Open Google Calendar and sign in with your Google account. Locate the 'Other' calendars section on the left sidebar, and click the + button. Select 'From URL' from the dropdown menu. Paste the unique link you copied from Airbnb in the URL of calendar field, then click Add calendar.
There are a few ways to sync your Airbnb and Vrbo calendars: Manually import/export iCal links: In Airbnb, go to your listing's Pricing and Availability section, then Calendar Sync. Copy the iCal link and paste it into Vrbo's Import Calendar feature. Repeat the process to import your Vrbo calendar into Airbnb.
Airbnb's interface is more user-friendly and community-driven, with more flexible cancellation policies and higher booking volume than Vrbo. Vrbo offers robust property protection but generally sees fewer bookings and has a more complex platform than Airbnb.
So, how often does your Airbnb calendar sync? Airbnb and VRBO calendars usually take a couple of hours to update. So, there's a chance that a guest could book on one platform, and another guest could book the same dates on another platform in the time it takes for your calendar to update.
To break down the math for easy comparison; If you host guests with VRBO for 166 days out of 365 (which is less than half a year), the commission rate becomes equal to that of Airbnb. If you are lucky enough to host a guest every day of the year, the commission fee goes to as low as 1.65 a day.
With your listing available on Airbnb and Vrbo at the same time, you can also split-test your listings by writing slightly different headlines and descriptions. You can even try targeting your listings to different audiences on each platform, such as families versus business travelers.
Channel managers automatically sync your availability across multiple OTAs, so if a guest makes a reservation on Airbnb at 12:00, there's no possibility of someone else going and booking through Vrbo at 12:01.
On Vrbo, hosts generally pay a commission fee of 5% per booking, plus a payment processing fee around 3%. Airbnb, on the other hand, typically charges hosts a service fee of 3% to 5% per booking. However, Airbnb also levies a guest service fee between 14% to 16% on bookings.
When syncing to both Airbnb and Vrbo set your pricing offset customization and check-in/out restrictions for Vrbo at the account level from the Customizations Page so your customization settings will apply to all listings at once!
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