IMPORTING ICAL CALENDARS
Completed
I wanted to import my Owners Direct and Airbnb calendars into my PromoteMyPlace availability calendar. However I discovered that PromoteMyPlace can't handle ICAL URLs (which both OD and Airbnb use).
I was extremely surprised and frustrated that this wasn't possible. I will now have to update availability manually every time I get a booking on OD or Airbnb. Presumably others have suffered from similar frustrations?
I think this is very poor. Why doesn't the Promotemyplace team get on and sort this out?
Have any other users found work-arounds for this?
Thanks
Nick
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I would really like this feature as well. However, you can import a nice looking OD calendar into your PMP calendar. It's not ideal, but isn't bad. It stays updated so that it will update on PMP if your OD calendar updates. The biggest downside is it doesn't look that good on a mobile device. To keep 3 sites synced I think you would need a master then link your pmp site to that one. On OD from your dashboard go to marketing tools click on website widgets and copy the HTML text to PMP and use the paste html tool. You can edit the script to display more moths or show differently.
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I would like the system to be able to link or sync with Supercontrol....does it do that? If it does, (without having to pay Super control to create a template) please let me know!
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Hi Shona. You can link your website to supercontrol without having to pay them to create a template. I have created a support ticket for you and we will help you via that ticket.
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Hi Nicholas. This is something we are looking to address. But if you are wanting 2 way synchronisation between calendars, i.e. you want to be able to export your calendar from PromoteMyPlace to OD and AirBnB and also import an ICAL feed from those sites back to PromoteMyPlace, it's not that simple, so requires a lot of thought and planning on the best way to achieve it. There are a lot of issues that can occur if the synchronisation is both ways, especially if you are importing multiple feeds. For example what happens if you get seperate bookings via OD and AirBnB that overlap (because they come in at the same time)? How should our system handle that?
ICAL updates are not instant, so there is always the possibility of double bookings.
It seems that most existing calendar applications require that you choose which site you will use as your master reservation system and export from there to other sites.
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I would also like to be able to sync the PMP calendar to our external booking system using iCal. At the moment I am embedding the external calendar but, of course, this means that I can't use the date search facility on PMP. An iCal import facility would be really valuable to me.
You said above that you are looking into it but that was 6 months ago - when is this likely to be available? I need to know before my annual renewal in August!
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Yes the same. I have 2 way between booking.com, air bnb, home away and trip. It works fine. I had one overlapping booking where people booked within 3 minutes if each other , but I wouldn’t have been able to update naunally at that time anyway, so would have double booked anyway. As we don’t have auto booking with pmp there wouldn’t be an issue, purely a benefit
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Yes, this would be a really valuable enhancement. Across the the booking systems it is one feature that helps greatly in managing calendars. HomeAway were very slow to implement this (years after others) but they realised the opportunity.
We're still in the site building process (very impressed) but, along with the booking manger, an ICAL import/export have become fundamental features of services such as PMP.
Compliments for the great work.
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Thanks for all your feedback on this. We are now planning to add import of ICAL feeds alongside the existing export feature. The development team are working on this at the moment and, assuming all goes well during testing, it should be available in the next release. However, we are also in the process of completing a migration to a new server environment, so things are particularly busy at the moment. We will let all customers know via email once this feature has been released.
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Is the ICAL import feature any closer?
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Really need this feature now. If it's not available soon I will have to migrate our site away from PmP.
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Development of the ICAL import feature has been completed now and we will be releasing it in beta, to customers that would like early access, before it's full release next year. This is because we need to make sure it works well with the different 3rd party ICAL feeds, so it needs to be tested with live data. If you would like it added to your account please contact support.
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Hi,
I am investigating how you link to another holiday system based on Supercontrol. I noticed in the forum that you can do that but you need to set it up? Is it possible to either a) sync the two sites instantly (ie no real master) or b) have the other site as the master and have it change promotemyplace when it changes. I get in b) I would have to turn off online booking on promotemyplace.
thanks
Tim
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