—Help

Calendar sync

Connect your Airbnb, VRBO, or Booking.com calendar and new bookings show up in your Inbox as drafts. You never email a guest until you confirm — we only fetch what the platform already exports.

How it works

Each platform exports an iCalendar feed (an .ics URL) listing your bookings as date ranges with a reservation code. PreArrive fetches that feed every 30 minutes, dedupes, and creates a synced reservation in your Inbox for each new booking.

iCal feeds don’t carry the guest’s name or email — only dates and a reservation code. You fill in the guest contact when you confirm. If you want guest contact auto-filled, also turn on forward-email parsing.

Where to find each platform’s iCal URL

Airbnb: Calendar → Availability → Connect another calendar → Export calendar. Copy the URL.
VRBO: Calendar → Import/Export → Export your VRBO calendar. Copy the URL.
Booking.com: Extranet → Calendar & rates → Sync calendars → Export. Copy the URL.

In PreArrive, open the property, click Calendar sync, paste the URL into the right platform’s row, and click Connect.

The Inbox

Open Inbox in the side rail to see every booking we’ve pulled but you haven’t confirmed yet. Each row shows the property, source (Airbnb / VRBO / Booking), reservation code, and dates.

Two buttons per row:

Confirm & edit — Promotes the reservation to draft. Asks you for guest name and email (the iCal pull doesn’t have these). After you save, the reservation is ready to send.
Ignore — Dismisses it. Use this for blocked-off dates the platform sent through as "events" but aren’t real bookings.

Sync limits and timing

We pull every 30 minutes. Click Sync now on the property’s Calendar sync screen to refresh on demand.

On Free you can connect 1 sync source total. Paid tiers connect as many as you have properties — one per platform per listing.

Still stuck? Message us — we read every message and reply within a few hours on weekdays.