Synchronising Gîtes de France and Airbnb, without any nasty surprises

What you need before you start

Take your time: nothing here is complicated. You need your login for your Gîtes de France owner area, your Airbnb login, and the details of your county contact, the person who looks after your property. It is all free.

Only one idea to understand first: the calendar link. It is an internet address that lets one website read another's calendar, regularly and on its own. Each connection works in a single direction, like a newspaper subscription: the subscriber receives the news, the other party receives nothing. If this idea is new to you, our page on the iCal link explained simply tells the story calmly, in everyday words.

And here is the Gîtes de France quirk, the one almost no guide explains. According to the network's documentation and the guides published by partner tourist offices, consulted in August 2026, the synchronisation offered by the network's tool works one way only by default: from Gîtes de France towards the other websites. In other words, a booking taken with Gîtes de France does hold your dates on Airbnb. But a booking taken on Airbnb holds nothing at Gîtes de France. The return direction does exist, and is switched on at your request by your county office. At the time of writing, practice may vary from one county to another: the exact answer belongs to your contact there, and that is one of the steps below.

Until you have made that request, treat your Gîtes de France schedule as unprotected: it is the one that can sell dates already taken elsewhere.

The connection, step by step

1. Fetch the calendar link of your property at Gîtes de France

Log in to your Gîtes de France owner area and open the schedule for your property. Look for the section about calendar synchronisation, often signposted by the word "iCal". It shows the calendar link for your property: a long internet address. Copy the whole of it and paste it into a note, labelled "Gîtes de France link".

If you cannot find that section, do not hunt for hours: owner areas differ from county to county. Ring your contact: they will tell you where it is, or send you the link.

2. Paste that link into Airbnb

Log in to Airbnb, open your listing and its calendar, then the availability settings. Look for "Connect calendars", then "Import calendar". Paste the Gîtes de France link, name it clearly ("Gîtes de France" will do), and confirm. If the link begins with webcal://, replace that beginning with https:// first.

From then on, your Gîtes de France bookings hold the dates on Airbnb. Airbnb reads that link again in cycles of roughly 3 hours, a rhythm published in its own help pages: a booking never crosses over the moment it is made, and that is normal.

3. Ask your county office to open the return direction

This is the step the guides forget, and it is the most important one. Ring or write to your county office, and ask the question plainly: "My calendar synchronisation works from Gîtes de France to Airbnb. I would also like the other direction: I want my Airbnb bookings to close my dates automatically on my Gîtes de France schedule. Can you switch that on, and tell me how to send you my Airbnb calendar link?"

Depending on the county, the answer may come back at once, take some time, or go through a form. Note what you are told and by whom: if one day a date is sold twice, knowing exactly what was switched on, and since when, will serve you well.

4. Send them your Airbnb calendar link

While you wait, or as soon as the return direction is open, prepare the link for the other way round. On Airbnb, still under "Connect calendars", choose "Export calendar" this time and copy the link shown. That is the link your county office will paste, or that you will paste yourself in your owner area if the section allows it where you are.

5. Test each direction, one after the other

Take nobody's word for it, not even ours: test it. Hold a distant and unimportant date on the Gîtes de France schedule, note the time, and watch for it appearing on Airbnb. Then do the reverse: hold a date on Airbnb and check that it closes at Gîtes de France. Allow several hours each way before worrying. The full method, including the check from a guest's point of view, is in how to check that your calendars are really synchronised. Remember to reopen your test dates at the end.

If the first direction works and the second does not, you have just seen the one-way behaviour for yourself: go back to step 3.

The traps to know about

Believing everything is synchronised when only one direction works. This is the central trap of this connection: you see your Gîtes de France bookings arriving on Airbnb, and conclude that "the sync works". Meanwhile, every Airbnb booking leaves the same dates on sale at Gîtes de France. Until the return direction is switched on and tested, close those dates by hand on your schedule, on the very day of each booking.

Forgetting that the delays add up. Each website reads the links again in cycles of a few hours, and a one-way connection makes those delays even more keenly felt: a single missed reading leaves the Gîtes de France schedule open for sale. The rhythms observed website by website are in our table of iCal synchronisation times.

The webcal:// link. Some websites show their calendar link with that beginning. Replace webcal:// with https:// before pasting it: it is the same link, written differently.

Assuming that every county does the same thing. The Gîtes de France network is federal: each county office has its own pace and sometimes its own tools. What holds true for your neighbour in another county might not hold for you. The right answer will always come from your own contact.

Staying calm, especially with a one-way connection

This connection has one weakness more than the others: part of it depends neither on you nor on a setting, but on something switched on for you. It may be slow to arrive, may drop out, or may never cover your case. And as always with calendars, nobody will warn you: a link that dies or a direction that is missing makes no sound at all, until two families book the same dates.

This is exactly the kind of set-up that continuous watching makes safe. A service that reads each of your calendar links every 30 minutes, checks that they answer, and alerts you as soon as a link fails or two bookings overlap, wherever they come from. It replaces neither Gîtes de France nor Airbnb, and it does not open the return direction on your behalf. It does one thing: it tells you quickly, while a problem can still be settled with a simple telephone call. Its health screen also shows which calendar is holding which dates: in a one-way set-up, that is the fastest way to spot an Airbnb booking that the Gîtes de France schedule has not yet closed.

What about Clévacances, Cybevasion or your tourist office?

The same principle holds for the other bodies that rural lettings work with. Clévacances and Cybevasion, two other French letting networks, offer calendar links in the same format: connecting them follows the same steps, export on one side, import on the other, and always check each direction. Once Gîtes de France and Airbnb are connected, adding one more website is well within your reach; the logic is the one in the guide on synchronising Airbnb and Booking.com.

A last word about tourist offices. In France, many of them support the owners in their area on these questions, some publish their own iCal guides, and their teams often know the local quirks, including those of the county offices. If you would rather make these connections with somebody sitting beside you, go and knock on their door: that is part of what they are there for.