Stop Double Bookings: Sync Airbnb, Booking.com and LekkeSlaap

Why double bookings happen

Almost nobody double books through carelessness. It happens because of a gap in time and a gap in visibility.

Say you list four rooms on Booking.com, two of them on Airbnb, and all four on LekkeSlaap. That is ten separate calendars, each one only aware of itself. A guest books room 3 on Booking.com at 14:20. At 14:35 someone phones you about the same weekend. You check the diary on your desk — which was last updated this morning — and say yes.

The phone booking is where small guest houses lose money, and it is almost always a visibility problem rather than a platform problem. You said yes because you could not see, in one place, what had already been sold.

That is the specific gap calendar sync closes. It is worth being precise about the rest, so the section further down sets out plainly what syncing does not do.

What an iCal link actually is

iCal (properly, iCalendar) is the open file format calendars have used for decades — the same one behind the .ics invitations that arrive by email. A booking platform publishes each listing's calendar at a permanent web address, and any other system that knows the address can read it.

It is read-only and one-directional by design. The link lets other software see that calendar. It does not let that software change it.

What GHM Suite does with the link

Once a link is saved against a room, GHM Suite takes over:

• Checks every 15 minutes. A scheduled job on our servers re-reads each connected calendar automatically. Nothing needs to be open on your phone or your computer.
• Creates the booking against the right room. Each link belongs to one room, so an imported booking lands where it belongs, on the right dates, and shows up on your dashboard, your agenda and your availability search.
• Never duplicates. Every platform gives each reservation a unique ID, which GHM Suite stores and checks before creating anything. Syncing the same calendar ten times imports nothing the eleventh time unless it is genuinely new.
• Ignores blocked dates. Platforms publish owner-blocked periods as calendar events too. Those are filtered out, so a weekend you closed for maintenance does not arrive as a phantom guest.
• Pulls guest details where the platform provides them. LekkeSlaap includes a guest reference, so those bookings import with a real name, email and phone number. Airbnb and Booking.com anonymise their feeds, so those come in labelled as an Airbnb or Booking.com guest.
• Tells you about it. If you have notifications turned on, new imported bookings can reach you as a push alert — see our article on installing GHM Suite for how that works.

Setting it up, platform by platform

In GHM Suite, open your guest house, go to Manage Calendars, and add a calendar for the room you want to connect. Then fetch the link from the platform. The same instructions are built into the app — look for "Where do I find my iCal link?" — but here they are in full.

Repeat for every room you have listed. A four-room guest house on all three platforms ends up with up to twelve links — tedious once, then never again.

What calendar sync does not do

This is the part most guides skip, and it is the part that decides whether the system actually works for you.

Three habits that close the remaining gap

• Check GHM Suite before you confirm anything by phone or WhatsApp. This is the whole point of the exercise. The Check Availability search takes a few seconds and covers every room and every platform at once.
• Capture direct bookings immediately. A booking that only exists in your head or on a notepad is invisible to every system you own. Enter it while the guest is still on the phone.
• Re-check your links after any listing change. New room, renamed unit, relisted property — re-copy the iCal link.

When something looks wrong

Common questions

Stuck on a particular link? Send us a message — a real person in South Africa will answer, and we have seen most of the odd cases by now.