Import bookings or blocked dates from up to three external iCal calendars per room in Settings > Channel Manager > iCal Import, for example from Google Calendar or a holiday rental site. Beds24 checks the calendars several times an hour and imports each full-day or multi-day event as a booking.
Quick Guide
- In Settings > Channel Manager > iCal Import, enter the URL of the calendar.
- Optional: enter phrases for events to ignore.
- Choose how the calendar marks the end of a booking and which bookings to ignore, then click Save.
Capabilities and limitations
- The event summary is imported as the guest name, the event description as the guest comment, and the full event as the Channel Info of the booking.
- Date changes are imported. If a previously imported booking is missing from a later import, its status changes to Cancelled.
- You can turn off importing changes and cancellations for single bookings or the whole calendar, and have the host notified by email about iCal cancellations.
- Changes to check-in, check-out and guest name are supported.
- The calendar must be online and public so Beds24 can poll it. Some calendars, like Google, set sharing per event: only public events are imported.
- Bookings must be full-day events on the days you want to block.
- Only the information listed here, and the custom fields, can be imported.
For the full list, see Channel Manager Capabilities.
Set up the import
- Go to Settings > Channel Manager > iCal Import and enter the URL of the calendar to import.
- Optional: enter phrases for events that shouldn't import, one per line. Events with the phrase in their summary or description are ignored.
- Select whether the calendar marks the end of a booking by the last night or the check-out date.
- Choose the import options you need:
- Ignore duplicates: doesn't import an event if another booking, from any channel and not cancelled, has the same dates. See Avoid duplicates.
- Ignore if all dates unavailable: doesn't import an event if the room is unavailable for any reason, such as no inventory or a blackout.
- Dont reuse cancelled if different: imports a new booking if a cancelled booking with a different UUID exists. By default, the cancelled booking is uncancelled.
- Click Save.
Expected result: Events from the calendar show as bookings in Beds24 after the next check.
Tip: If you imported from the wrong calendar or with the wrong settings, click the delete booking tool link to delete all imported bookings.
Avoid duplicates
If you import from a calendar that also gets your iCal export (a two-way connection), bookings can pass back and forth and create duplicates.
- Ignore duplicates doesn't import an event if a non-cancelled booking exists in the same room for the same dates, whatever its source. For example, a booking from your booking page exported by iCal to another system isn't imported again.
- Only the dates are compared. An event isn't imported if a booking for exactly the same dates exists in the room, even if it's a different booking.
- To stop imported bookings from being exported again, see Two-way sync without duplicates.
Custom fields
If the iCal feed contains these custom fields, Beds24 imports them into the matching booking fields. For details, contact the supplier of the feed.
X-EMAIL: somebody@example.com X-PHONE: 12345678 X-NUMADULT: 2 X-NUMCHILD: 0 X-PRICE: 100
Disconnect
- Remove the calendar URL.
- Set the import (for example Import 2) = Disable and click Save.