If you sell the same room on your own website and on one or more booking sites, something has to tell each of them when a night is sold. When nothing does, two guests book the same room, and one of them gets a phone call nobody wants to make.<\/p>\n\n
There are two ways to pass that message along, and both are sold under the same word: sync. They move very different things. iCal sync moves blocked dates, after a delay. A channel manager moves availability, rates, restrictions and the reservation itself, as they change. Which one you need depends on your property, and for some properties the lighter one is enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
iCal is a calendar format, the same one a phone uses to subscribe to a calendar. Each system publishes a calendar feed: a web address that lists the periods when a room is taken. You give your website’s address to the booking site and the booking site’s address to your website, and each side reads the other’s feed from time to time.<\/p>\n\n
A feed is a list of events. Each event has a start date, an end date and a short label, and it says one thing: this period is busy. That is all the other side needs to close those nights.<\/p>\n\n
The calendar standard was written for meetings and appointments, not for selling rooms. It has no field for a nightly rate, a minimum stay or the number of rooms still free. What a feed says about the guest is whatever the sender chose to put in the label, and that is usually very little.<\/p>\n\n
So a booking that reaches you through a calendar feed arrives as a blocked period, not as a reservation. You still have to open the booking site to see who is coming, what they paid and what they asked for.<\/p>\n\n
The side that reads a feed decides when to read it. The large booking sites publish their schedules in their help pages, and they range from about half an hour to a few hours. Your own website reads their feeds on the schedule you give it.<\/p>\n\n
Between two reads, both sides can sell the same night. This is where iCal double bookings come from, and no setting on your side removes the gap completely. You can shorten your half of it. The other half belongs to the booking site, so look up calendar import in your platform’s help pages to see how often it reads your feed.<\/p>\n\n
With Solidres:<\/strong> the iCal plugin comes with every paid Solidres subscription. Each room type has its own feed address, protected by a token, which lists that room type’s reservations and blocked dates for the months ahead, six by default. In the other direction, you paste one or more feed addresses into the room type, and a scheduled task in Joomla reads them and turns each event into a blocked period, using the Limit Booking plugin. The task runs as often as you schedule it, which is why it is worth setting up a real cron job for Joomla’s Task Scheduler<\/a>. The steps for both directions are in the guide to configuring iCal in Solidres<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n A channel manager is a connection between the one system that holds your inventory, the master, and the booking sites that sell it, the channels. When something changes in the master, the change is sent to the channels. When a channel takes a booking, the booking is sent back.<\/p>\n\n Availability as a number: how many rooms of each type are left on each night. Nightly rates. And restrictions, such as a minimum stay, a night that is closed to arrival, or a stop sell that takes a date off a channel altogether.<\/p>\n\n The reservation itself, with the guest, the dates, the rooms and the prices. If the guest later changes or cancels the booking on the channel, that comes back too.<\/p>\n\n Changes are sent when they happen, not collected later. That narrows the window in which two places can sell the same night from hours to moments. It does not close it: two guests can still book the last room at almost the same time, which is why a channel manager should show you an overbooking and not hide it.<\/p>\n\n With Solidres:<\/strong> the Solidres Channel Manager<\/a> connects your Solidres site to Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, Agoda and Vrbo, plus a long list of regional and niche channels, and Solidres stays the master of your inventory. Alongside availability and nightly rates, it sends minimum stay, maximum stay and stop sell. A booking made on a channel lands in Solidres within seconds as a normal reservation, with the guest, the dates, the rooms and the per-night prices the channel sent, and modifications and cancellations are applied automatically. If a channel booking arrives for dates you no longer have free, it is still saved, as a cancelled reservation with a note explaining why, so you can see the overbooking and deal with it. You connect your own channel accounts, and we take no commission on any booking. The Channel Manager runs on top of Solidres, so it needs both a Solidres subscription, at any level, and a Channel Manager subscription.<\/p>\n\n The same comparison in one table. Where a booking site decides the answer, the table says so.<\/p>\n\nWhat a channel manager is<\/h2>\n\n
What it sends out<\/h3>\n\n
What comes back<\/h3>\n\n
The timing<\/h3>\n\n
The Solidres Channel Manager<\/h3>\n\n
Side by side<\/h2>\n\n