The calendar link (iCal) explained to everybody

What you need before you start

Nothing to install, nothing to buy. You need your logins for the platforms where your property is listed, and three simple ideas. All three fit into a single picture.

The picture to remember: a newspaper subscription

The calendar of your Airbnb listing is like a newspaper. It changes every day: a booking arrives, another is cancelled, you hold a week for building work.

The iCal link, which we call the calendar link here, is the subscription to that newspaper. In practice it is an internet address: a long string of letters and figures beginning with https. When you give that address to Booking.com, Booking.com subscribes. It comes back to read your Airbnb calendar at regular intervals, of the order of 2 to 3 hours (a rhythm observed in August 2026; Airbnb, for its part, publishes a rhythm of 3 hours for its own readings), and updates its own availability. You have nothing left to copy out by hand.

What the subscription is not: a photocopy. Platforms also let you download the calendar as a file, a file ending in .ics. But a file is yesterday's newspaper. It will never update itself. If you hand over the file instead of the link, the other side reads a frozen photocopy, and everything stops at the day of the download. This confusion is the number one cause of calendars that "freeze", particularly when people want to see their Airbnb bookings in Google Calendar.

Importing, exporting: the newspaper travels both ways

Every platform can do two things with calendars.

Exporting means handing out its own newspaper. The platform gives you the calendar link for your listing, and you carry it elsewhere.

Importing means subscribing to somebody else's newspaper. You paste into the platform a link that came from elsewhere, and it comes to read it regularly.

Hold on to this: a subscription only works in one direction. If Booking.com reads Airbnb's newspaper, Airbnb still knows nothing about Booking.com. For two platforms to keep each other informed, you need two connections: each one imports the other's link. With only one direction connected, a booking taken on the wrong side holds nothing opposite.

It is free, entirely

The newspaper subscription costs nothing. The calendar link is provided free of charge by Airbnb, Booking.com, Abritel and almost every letting website. Pasting it costs nothing either, and there is no time limit. If somebody wants to charge you for "iCal synchronisation" on its own, be wary: this basic mechanism is free everywhere.

Where to find your calendar link, platform by platform

The paths below are the ones observed in August 2026. Platforms sometimes move their menus, but the key words to look for stay the same: "calendar", "sync", "export", "iCal".

1. On Airbnb

Log in to your account, open your listings and choose the property concerned. Open its calendar. In the calendar settings, under the section about availability, look for "Connect calendars" (sometimes "Calendar sync"). Choose "Export calendar": a window shows your calendar link, which contains the word "ical". Copy the whole of it.

2. On Booking.com

Log in to the extranet, the area reserved for partners. Open the tab about the calendar and rates, then look for "Sync calendars". You will find two buttons there: one to add a calendar from elsewhere (import), and one to obtain the calendar link for your Booking.com listing (export). Copy the latter in full.

3. On Abritel

Log in to your owner account and open the calendar for your listing. Look for the section about importing and exporting calendars. Abritel, the French arm of Vrbo, sometimes shows a link beginning with webcal:// rather than https://. That link works, on one condition: replace webcal:// with https:// yourself before pasting it elsewhere. It is the same link, written with a beginning that some platforms do not understand.

4. Keep your links in one place

Paste each link into a note or a document, with a clear label: "Airbnb link, village cottage", "Booking.com link, village cottage". With several properties you will soon have a small collection, and a clear label saves you from pasting the link of the wrong property. One last point: this link can be read without a password. Do not publish it anywhere; give it only to the platforms and tools you trust.

The traps of the first few times

The link beginning with webcal://. This is not a mistake, just different clothing. Replace webcal:// with https:// and the link becomes acceptable everywhere.

The address of the listing pasted instead of the calendar link. This is the great classic: people copy the address of their listing page, the one with the photographs and the Book button. The platform then refuses it, often with the message "The URL must be a valid link ending in .ICS". If that happens to you, the repair step by step is in our guide on the invalid .ICS link error.

The downloaded file instead of the link. The photocopy instead of the subscription. Everything seems to work on the first day, and then nothing ever moves again. If you are offered "Import a file" and "Subscribe to an address", always choose the address.

Only one direction connected. You imported Booking.com into Airbnb and stopped there. Half the work is still to do, and it is the invisible half: everything looks in order until the booking that is not held on the other side. Connecting both directions in full is set out in our guide on synchronising the Airbnb and Booking.com calendars.

Checking that your link works, and staying calm

The simplest test takes ten seconds: paste your calendar link into a browser's address bar. If text appears or downloads beginning with BEGIN:VCALENDAR, the link is alive. That text is your newspaper, written in machine language: each block corresponds to a booking or a held period.

There remains a truth no guide should keep quiet about. A subscription can stop in silence. The platform changes your link without warning, a setting drops out, and the newspaper stops arriving. Nobody sends you a letter to say so: the subscribing platform keeps yesterday's newspaper and displays it as though it were fresh. The reading rhythms, for their part, do not depend on you: count on hours between two passes, and the exact figures are in our table of iCal synchronisation times.

This is where watching earns its place. A watching service runs that ten-second test on your behalf, on each of your links, every 30 minutes. It alerts you when a newspaper stops arriving, and when two bookings overlap. You keep the platforms' free iCal; all you add is somebody keeping an eye on it. Two comforts come along with it: if you cannot find the link in the menus, you can paste in the whole email that contains it and the link is picked out automatically; and the calendars the service hands back out hide guests' names and details, so that nothing but taken dates can be read in them.

The logical next step: connect your first two platforms together, in both directions, by following the guide on synchronising Airbnb and Booking.com.