When creating your properties in the Landlord Dashboard, you will notice that there are different possibilities for you to maintain your availabilities. From Channel Managers to iCal, or even manually.
In the hospitality industry, iCal, sometimes called ics, is used as a standard for storing reservation information. It is a way to sync booking calendars between OTA’s (i.e. Airbnb, Agoda, Booking.com, etc). This all happens similarly to recording meetings and events on your personal Google Calendar.
Using iCal on Homelike is easy, free, and will save you a lot of time in the long run. Any calendar that has a .ics or .ical file format will be able to sync with Homelike. Follow the steps below to Sync your calendar of choice with your Homelike property.
Important to note
- iCal provides you with one-way sync capabilities. Every booking that you receive on Homelike needs to be added manually to your iCal Calendar. If you want your Homelike bookings to appear automatically in your personal calendar, opt for one of our other integration options.
- Homelike focuses on the midterm rental market, where 30 days is the minimum duration of a stay. Therefore, only availability slots of a longer duration will be visible for the tenants.
Syncing your Google Calendar with Homelike
Step 1: Select the Calendar you want to sync
Go to your Google Calendar and locate the calendar that’s associated with your property. Each listing on your Homelike account needs to have a separate iCal linked to them.
The example Calendar below has two bookings. These will block the property calendar during that timeframe and will ensure that there are no overbookings possible.
Step 2: Go to Calendar Settings
By clicking on the three vertical dots next to the calendar name. A new window will open. Click on “Settings and sharing”, and you’ll be guided to the Calendar specific settings.
Step 3: Secret address in iCal
A new window will open, and when scrolling down, you’ll see the heading “Integrate calendar“. All the different ways Google offers you to integrate your calendar with other tools and websites are available here.
To integrate your calendar with your Homelike account, you’ll be needing the “Secret address in iCal format”. Click on the copy icon on the right-hand side of the grey box.
Step 4: Import your Calendar on Homelike
When navigating to the Apartment section on the Homelike Landlord Dashboard, and going to the “edit” window of your property, you can add your iCal link in the “Availability” section.
Once you’ve pasted the link, a few checks will happen in the background to ensure everything is working. Once these have finished, your calendar will be synced automatically in the next couple of hours. Any changes you now make on your Google Calendar will be reflected in Homelike as well.If any issues arise, please reach out to your Homelike Account Manager or to integrations@thehomelike.com