Back in 2012 the Home Away group (homeaway.co.uk, ownersdirect.co.uk et al) removed support for importing bookings into their calendars via an iCal feed. The great news is that, as of September 2015, they began to reinstate this important feature!
Time is Money.
At Scrumpy we understand just how hard it is for property owners to manage keeping all their various channel calendars up to date. Scrumpy natively produces an iCal link for each property calendar as standard.
Up to now this has proved useful to our customers who use AirBnB or Flipkey etc, as they have had iCal importing for some time. But arguably the largest listing group out there (HomeAway) have seemed resistant to change. Maybe it was to try and force owners to buy into the entire HomeAway ecosystem (taking bookings through their systems), who knows. Whatever the reason for the change of heart it is a welcome move and will save our property owners hours of valuable time.
How To Do It.
If you list your property on one of the HomeAway suite of sites simply copy the iCal URL (which can be found in your admin at the very bottom of the property calendar page) and paste it into import calendar section on your HomeAway admin screen. Here is a step-by-step:
- Copy the link from the property calendar admin - it looks like this:
- Log in to your account.
- Click Calendar.
- Select the correct property.
- Click the Import/Export Calendar icon.
- Click Import Calendar.
- Give the calendar a name.
- Select a colour to represent the calendar.
- Enter the calendar URL.
- Select whether the calendar will block availability. (Note: in order to block availability, the event must span at least one night.)
- Click Import Calendar.
- You're done - no more updating multiple systems every time you get a new booking!
Currently, you can only import five additional calendars. The calendar is updated every hour.
At Scrumpy we currently support calendar synchronisation with anyone who accepts iCal files (AirBnB, Flipkey, Tripadvisor and now the HomeAway group), along with dedicated syncing with Sleeps12.com, Super Control, Premier Cottages and of course any other Scrumpy powered site via the property sharing feature.
Please talk to us if you want to know more.