With Google Calendar, you can flexibly import external calendars and display multiple calendars on a website.
If you are taking bookings, it can make sense to integrate all the bookings from multiple platforms into a single calendar rather than display multiple calendars.
To prevent double booking platforms like VBRO and ABNB allow calendar syncronisation. But they’d rather you booked through them and often won’t let you embed their calendar directly.
A solution to this limitation is to make your Google Calendar the default publicly visible calendar on your website.
While a bit of manual labour is involved, you can use the public and private visibility options carefully to: a) selectively show a price calendar (which can show basic pricing or offers); and b) display the bookings; and even c) recycling days and d) other useful local information (a simple notice board).
By default an entry in a Google Calendar is private until you mark it either public or “busy”. To avoid accidentally exposing customer data publicly (as illustrated in the frivolous example above) always make the entry “busy”.
If you’d rather avoid the platform (no bad thing) and are actually more comfortable with a little bit of toing and froing before confirming a booking, this is an effective and economical solution. Cancelling a hasty booking made through a platform can be irksome (can tarnishes one’s reputation). But you can save a mountain on transaction fees too.
:-)
If you’d like to try this solution drop the google calendar embed code into an iframe (if the iframe plugin is enabled) – or ask us to enable it for a donation (which helps ourlocality be more sustainable).
