What you need to know about the sync calendar feature in your Calendar tab
Dear Community,
We have noticed that the topic of calendar synchronisation is one you care about.
Some of you mentioned that you experience difficulties with the sync calendar feature in your Calendar tabs. We have heard your feedback on the amount of manual work you needed to do, as well as the issues you face.
We brought this to the attention of the team working on the sync calendar feature, and with this post we would like to share and reinforce what the feature is useful for - hoping to also help you understand what it is not intended to do - so that you have clear expectations.
In summary, we can say that:
- The sync calendar feature is meant for new partners who have not yet chosen a connectivity provider or channel manager.
- It offers an overview of your Booking.com calendar on other third-party reservation calendars that you might use, but it has a number of limitations.
- While free to use and thus might seem an attractive option, the synchronisation function is not and was never meant to be real-time (often, syncing may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours).
- The feature is offered “as is” and receives little maintenance.
The essence of our conversations with the team is that it should not be used to replace connectivity providers should you need real-time syncing, and that given how the feature is offered “as is” it will not be further improved.
On that note, there is guidance published on the site that can help you. For example, you can read this article to better understand how to choose a connectivity provider, but also this one on how to connect to one.
We in the Community team hope that this post brings more clarity and better expectations for using the sync calendar feature.
If you have further questions, please leave them in the comments below and we’ll do our best to give visibility to these to the team. And if you think that this post is valuable to remember, you can of course save it to your profile so that everytime you need it, you can quickly find it in your saved content.
Thank you so much for your collaboration!
Didem and the Community team
Oh no....
.... brace yourself there's going to be an incoming wave of irate partners on this topic.
Both myself and IsleofWight have posted and replied to 200++ partners over the last 2 years on this very topic.
I usually keep it simple.
Don't use bdc calendar sync instead get a 3rd party channel manager provider, if you list on 2 or more OTA.
The CM service becomes both the golden calender and sync master.
It governs all other calendar connections.
This in turn prevents 99% of double bookings
so bookings not only refuses to do anything about "payments by bookings" in puerto Rico now the nerve to not provide what should be a basic service. Thanks for the honesty yet what pattern I see with bookings is that if what tons of host complain about isn't in bookings best financial interest they won't put maintenance into it. bookings gets a rating of 2 from me.
they must also reap from us paying more for this channel manager
Incorrect, BdC dont own nor operate their own Channel Manager.
THats always been an independent 3rd party services just like PMS service providers.
Hi BrookAve and Tamara cruz, thank you so much for your time in sharing your feedback and experiences about the calendar here!