Airbnb Reservation and Calendar Sync – Vacation Rental Software Blog

Lodgix can now sync your Lodgix calendar data with your listings on Airbnb using our iCal feed.

Lodgix can also automatically create invoices on Lodgix from confirmed reservations on Airbnb, which saves a ton of time having to manually rekey reservations on Airbnb into Lodgix, as well as it keeps your calendars immediately up to date across all platforms, avoid any possibility of double bookings.

Calendar Sync – Locate the Lodgix iCal Feed

Click on the Settings > Channel Management > Calendar Sync menu item within Lodgix.

Click on the iCalendar Tab

Find your property
Cut the .ics (iCalendar) feed URL provided for that property, you will need to paste the URL into Airbnb

Login to Airbnb

Steps 1 & 2 show the steps within Airbnb to locate where to enter the source calendar address from Lodgix. Click on the “Found It” button and copy / paste the iCal feed for that property from Lodgix.

Note: This tutorial was made 2/24/2014 and the iCal import worked fine. Some have said that Airbnb has turned off this feature, but at least for a brand new account it worked as of today.

Reservation Sync – Airbnb

NOTICE: Only confirmed bookings from Airbnb are imported into Lodgix.

Find your Airbnb property id, in the example above it’s 2450965

Map Airbnb Property ID to Corresponding Lodgix Property

Go Settings > Channel Management > Calendar Sync > Mappings Tab

Update Airbnb with your custom Lodgix.com email address

The email address to use on Airbnb is in the format:

book-<customer_id>@lodgix.com (eg book-2@lodgix.com)

You can find your customer id here: http://www.lodgix.com/system/edit_settings

Make sure to SAVE the updated email address.

Limitations of the Reservation Sync

Because Airbnb does not provide a legit way of syncing reservation data, we had to use an alternative method. This method involves reading (parsing) the reservation confirmation email that is sent to the listing owner when a reservation is confirmed.

The data on that email is limited to the property id, the guest name, the guest phone number and the arrival and departure dates of the booking.

Lodgix will automatically create an invoice using this data. A fake email address will be assigned to the guest. It is your responsibility to login to airbnb and cut / paste the actual guest email address into Lodgix. Likewise it is your responsibility to edit the invoice to match the charges assessed at Airbnb.