Booking.com iCal export: a cleaning schedule that holds

22 October 2026 · Readyby team · 6 min read

If your apartment is on Booking.com, the extranet already knows every checkout, and every checkout is a cleaning. The Booking.com iCal export gets that information out of the extranet and into something your cleaners can use. This guide covers where to find the export, what the feed contains, how to run the same apartment on Booking.com and Airbnb without double bookings, and which link to give your cleaning schedule.

Where to find the Booking.com iCal export

Booking.com calls this calendar sync. In the extranet, the steps usually look like this:

Open Rates & Availability (on some accounts it is under Calendar or Calendar & Pricing) and go to the calendar of the right unit.
Look for Sync calendars.
Booking.com first offers to import another calendar. You can add one there or skip that step.
In the export part, choose what to export: booked dates only, or booked and closed dates.
Copy the link.

Extranet labels change between versions and languages, so if you can't see it, search the Partner Hub for "sync calendars"; Booking.com keeps its own instructions in the article on syncing your calendar with third-party calendars.

Two limits catch people out. Each unit has its own link, so check you copied the right one. And if your property is connected to a channel manager, the sync option is usually not offered at all: the channel manager handles availability, and you take the calendar from there instead.

What the Booking.com feed contains

The feed is even sparser than Airbnb's. Each event is a stretch of dates, nothing more:

No guest name, no contact details.
No check-in or check-out times. Dates only. Your extranet arrival times aren't in it.
No guest count.
No difference between a guest and a closure. If you export booked and closed dates, a week you closed for painting looks exactly like a booking.

Booking.com also doesn't decide how often the feed is read. The calendar on the other end does. That one detail explains most of the double bookings below.

The same apartment on Booking.com and Airbnb

Many hosts list one apartment on both. Without a channel manager, iCal is the free way to keep them in step, and it has to run both ways:

Copy the Airbnb export link and add it in Booking.com under Sync calendars as an imported calendar.
Copy the Booking.com export link and add it in Airbnb (Calendar, Availability, Connect calendars, Connect to another website). Airbnb's steps are in its article on syncing calendars.

Now a booking on one side closes the dates on the other, with a delay. Airbnb says it updates imported calendars every three hours (you can press Refresh to check sooner). Booking.com reads Airbnb's feed on its own schedule. In that gap, both platforms still show the dates as free, which is how double bookings happen.

Ways to shrink the risk:

Use advance notice on Airbnb so nobody can book the same day, when the gap hurts most.
After a booking lands on one platform, refresh the import on the other if you can.
Don't chain calendars through a third calendar (Airbnb into Google into Booking.com). Every hop adds its own delay.

Which feed should the cleaning tool get?

This is the question most guides skip. You have two choices: give the cleaning tool just the Airbnb link (which, after syncing, also blocks the Booking.com dates) or give it both links.

Give it both. Here's why the Airbnb link alone isn't enough:

In Airbnb's export, a Booking.com stay shows up as a blocked night, "Airbnb (Not available)". That looks the same as a night you closed for yourself, so a tool can't tell whether it needs a cleaning afterwards.
It arrives late. The stay first has to reach Airbnb's import, which runs every three hours, before it can reach the cleaning tool.
If the sync between the platforms breaks, which happens when a link is deleted or a feed fails, your cleaning schedule goes blind for Booking.com bookings and nobody notices.

With both links, each platform's bookings come straight from the source. The cost is duplicates: the same stay appears in the Booking.com feed and as a block in the Airbnb feed. A spreadsheet or shared calendar will show it twice. A cleaning tool has to recognise it as one stay.

One more choice to make on the Booking.com side: if your export includes closed dates, a period you closed by hand looks like a guest stay and will look like it needs a cleaning. Check which option your export uses.

Manual schedules and where they break

Before any tool, hosts usually try one of these:

A shared Google Calendar with both feeds subscribed. Cheap, but Google refreshes subscribed calendars when it chooses, the cleaner sees each stay twice, and blocks look like bookings.
A spreadsheet updated from both extranets. Accurate on the day you update it, out of date by the next booking. Cancellations stay in it.
A WhatsApp group with the daily plan. Fast, but changes get lost in the chat and you never know who read what.

All three depend on someone checking two platforms and passing changes on. Our post on the Airbnb iCal cleaning schedule walks through these in more detail.

How Readyby handles Booking.com and Airbnb together

Paste both links, the Booking.com one and the Airbnb one, and attach them to the same apartment. If you paste them separately, Readyby notices when two calendars list the same stays and suggests combining them into one apartment.

Readyby reads each link every few minutes.
A stay with the same dates in both feeds becomes one cleaning, not two. An Airbnb block that mirrors a Booking.com stay is recognised and dropped.
Other blocks don't create cleanings unless you switch on cleaning after owner blocks for that apartment.
Each cleaning gets a window from checkout to the next check-in, using the times you set for the apartment, since neither feed has them. Tight windows are flagged.
The AI coordinator sends the plan to the cleaner on WhatsApp in her language, asks her to confirm, and tells her when a booking moves or is cancelled. She works through a web checklist with photos from a personal link, no app needed.

What Readyby doesn't do: it doesn't sync availability between Booking.com and Airbnb for you, and it doesn't replace a channel manager. Keep the two-way iCal sync above for that. Direct connections to channel managers are coming; today Readyby works through iCal only (see integrations). When a guest asks to leave later on the day itself, the late-checkout playbook has a simple routine.

See your own two weeks

The quickest test is to paste your two links and look at the next two weeks of cleanings. Try the interactive demo first if you prefer, or start free; setup takes about 15 minutes.