Do three guest rooms really need a channel manager?
An iCal link carries one thing: which nights are taken. For a small house that is often enough. Here is where it breaks, and when paying more makes sense.
A made-up example, for this article. Tuesday, 2.05 pm. A three-room chambre d’hôtes is listed on Airbnb and Booking.com. A couple book the ground-floor room for Saturday on Booking.com. At 3.20 pm a solo traveller books the same room, for the same Saturday, on Airbnb. Nobody cheated. Airbnb simply had not gone back to read the Booking.com calendar yet.
That is not a fault. It is how an iCal calendar works, and Airbnb says so itself: an imported calendar automatically updates every 3 hours. You can refresh it by hand, but only so many times, and then you wait for the next automatic update.
What an iCal link carries
An iCal link is a web address the platform gives you for each listing. You paste one platform’s link into the other, and each reads the other from time to time. What it reads fits in one sentence: this night is taken. Nights booked or blocked on Airbnb show as blocked on the other side, and nights booked elsewhere are blocked on Airbnb.
What it leaves out matters just as much. No prices: change a rate on Airbnb and you have to change it by hand on Booking.com too, as a guide from the software firm Guesty points out. The same guide says an iCal link only tells the other platform that a date is blocked, without the guest’s name, phone number or booking price. No messages either: the other platform sees closed dates and nothing more. Airbnb also warns that nights you block elsewhere, such as preparation time between stays, may not come through.
The three-hour gap
Back to Tuesday. Between the Booking.com booking and Airbnb’s next look, the room is still open on Airbnb. That is the risk window. It lasts until the next read, and it only goes wrong if someone books the same room for the same night inside it.
When it does, someone has to cancel. If that is you, on Airbnb, the host cancellation policy sets a fee of at least US$50: 25% of the reservation amount if you cancel between 30 days and 48 hours before check-in, and 50% of the reservation amount for the nights not stayed if you cancel 48 hours or less before. You get no payout for that booking, and you can lose Superhost status. In our example Saturday is four days away, so that is the 25% band.
For a three-room house, the risk depends on two things you know better than anyone: how many platforms are linked, and how many guests book at the last minute. A booking made six weeks ahead rarely lands in the same gap as another. A July night that sells the evening before is a different story.
When a channel manager pays off
A channel manager connects differently. You give the software permission to manage your Airbnb account, then publish and manage your listings directly from it. Guesty’s guide, written by a firm that makes such software, calls this real-time sync of prices, availability and guest data. That costs money. Beds24, for instance, lists a subscription from €15.50 a month, and charges €0.55 a month for each room type linked to a channel.
My rule of thumb, not a law: with two platforms, bookings that mostly come in well ahead and prices you rarely touch, a properly set-up iCal link is often enough. From three platforms, or if a good share of your nights sell in the last few days, or if you change prices every week on every site, a channel manager usually earns its fee. One forced cancellation can cost more than several months of software.
Weighing up commission as well? I work it through in the piece on Airbnb’s 15.5% host fee.
If you stay with iCal
Three habits make the gap smaller without closing it. After every booking, refresh the imported calendar on Airbnb by hand, within the limit Airbnb allows. Block preparation nights yourself on each platform, since iCal may drop them. And on your own website, let guests send a request rather than book outright: you confirm, then close the dates everywhere.
I should say that I sell something in this area. I quit Google to build PocheBnB, all-in-one software for chambres d’hôtes and gîtes that gathers your calendars by iCal link, and which I set up with each owner on a call. For calendars it is not a channel manager: it reads the same iCal links, with the same limits and each platform’s own update pace. On the call, we’ll show you exactly what is switched on for your house.
Also in the journal: washing-up and house rules on Airbnb.