Abritel or Vrbo has wrongly blocked your calendar: the step-by-step guide to unblocking it

What is happening to you

You open your Airbnb calendar and whole stretches of it have become unavailable, marked with something like "Abritel" or "Vrbo". Sometimes a few days, sometimes months, sometimes the entire calendar. On the other side, on Abritel, no booking justifies any of it. You have changed nothing.

One reflex to keep: do not delete the sync in a panic. An import that is disconnected reopens every date at once, including those that genuinely had to stay closed, and it exposes you to a double booking for as long as the link is off. Unblocking is done in order, and it starts with a two-minute investigation: who blocked what?

Abritel is the French arm of Vrbo: the same platform, the same calendar exports, a different name depending on the country you let from.

What to do now: unblocking step by step

1. Make Airbnb tell you where each block comes from

On the Airbnb calendar, click a blocked date. The panel that opens states the origin: the name of the imported calendar that is blocking, or a mention of a block placed on Airbnb itself. Note what three or four dates spread across the blocked stretch have to say. If they all point to the imported Abritel calendar, the block is travelling through the sync: carry on here. If they point to Airbnb itself, skip to the section on internal blocks, further down.

2. Open the Abritel calendar in a browser

Copy the calendar link that Airbnb imports from Abritel (it is shown in the calendar connection section). If it begins with webcal://, replace that beginning with https://. Open it in a new tab: you get plain text in which every blocked period appears with its dates and a title. How to read that text line by line is set out in the guide to Airbnb (Not available) dates: the principle is the same for every platform.

That text is the truth of what Abritel exports. If the dates blocked on Airbnb appear in it, Abritel really is sending them. If they do not appear in it, Airbnb is showing an out-of-date version: go straight to step 5.

3. Identify the nature of each exported block

Three cases cover most of what is found in an Abritel export that blocks too much:

• Provisional bookings or pending requests. This behaviour is documented by the platform itself: the Abritel/Vrbo export offers an option to "include provisional bookings", and the official help states that these unconfirmed requests then appear as blocked dates in the exported calendar, recommending that the option be kept for private diaries (observed in August 2026). On the Abritel side, settle every request (accepted, declined or expired), or recreate the export link without that option.
• Forgotten manual blocks. A period closed by hand a long time ago, a test stay, building work that was never reopened. They stand out very clearly in the text, with their exact dates.
• An echo coming from elsewhere. If the Abritel export contains stays that in fact come from Airbnb, your set-up is going round in circles: Abritel re-exports what it imports, and each platform ends up receiving its own bookings back. That mechanism, and how to cut it, are explained in calendar conflicts between Airbnb and Vrbo.

4. Fix it at source, never in the calendar that suffers

The natural reflex is to reopen the dates on Airbnb. That is pointless: as long as Abritel exports the block, it will come back at the next reading. Correct it on the Abritel side (requests settled, manual blocks lifted, loop cut), then let the correction travel.

5. Wait for one cycle, then force a re-read if needed

Platforms re-read calendar links in cycles, not continuously: the rhythms observed platform by platform are in iCal sync delays. Conclude nothing before a full cycle has passed. If the block persists beyond that although the export is clean, delete the imported link on the Airbnb side and paste it back: reconnecting usually triggers a first, quick reading. Do it at a quiet moment, since the interruption temporarily reopens the dates.

6. Check the result on both sides

Once the dates are back to normal, do the full round: the dates to reopen are open everywhere, those that must stay closed are closed, and each platform is reading the others properly. The two-minute test is described in how to check that your calendars really are in sync.

What does not come from syncing: internal blocks

Let us be clear, because nobody writes it down: some blocks travel through no calendar link at all, and no outside tool can lift them. Ours no more than any other. Recognising them saves you from looking in the wrong place:

• Identity verification or a declined booking. Hosts report on help forums a calendar frozen for up to 24 hours around a declined request or a traveller check, and dates that stay blocked after a request expires with no answer (reported cases, consulted in August 2026). It clears on its own, or with support.
• Dates frozen after a host cancellation. This is a deliberate policy: Airbnb, for example, provides that the dates of a stay cancelled by the host remain blocked in the calendar, unless the platform accepts the circumstances. Only support can decide otherwise, usually on the strength of a file showing a genuine syncing problem.
• The "unavailable period" seen by travellers. Your guests see dates closed although your calendar is open: look at your minimum stay, your booking notice and your preparation time between two stays. Those rules close dates to sale without showing them as blocked in your calendar.

If your case is on that list, the route goes through the platform's support team, with dated screenshots. Syncing has nothing to do with it.

How to avoid going through this again

The whole investigation above comes down to one question: who blocked what? You have just answered it by hand, by opening plain text files and clicking date by date. That is workable once. Not every week, and not across three properties.

That is exactly what a single, central view changes: all your calendars read in one place, every period shown with its origin and its title. When a stretch becomes blocked, you see at a glance which calendar is sending it and since when, instead of deducing it. The health dashboard also shows when each platform last read your calendar: step 5 of this page, waiting for a cycle without knowing whether it has happened, becomes a simple matter of reading a clock. Add an automatic check every 30 minutes: a calendar that stops responding, or two bookings that overlap, triggers an email alert the same day. And because each platform receives an output built for it, one that never sends its own bookings back, echoing blocks can no longer spread from one calendar to another. The next mysterious block will not stay mysterious for long.