Extended iCal (ics) with full details
iCal is a very popular format within many OTA to sync reservation information with others. Airbnb. Booking, Tripadvisor and many others are using it. One of the main disadvantage of ical is lack of information about the reservation and the guests. We decide to change it and happy to announce Extended Ical.
Extended iCal based on the same standards and specifications as the original one you can use it with any software with iCal support. What we did is quite obvious and predictable and we are wonder why nobody did that before. We create pack all guests and reservations details in a base64 encoded string and add it to iCal DESCRIPTION
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Effective Tours//effectivetours.com//-
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:All Villa / All Villa (12 guests) [RO]
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20200118T130000Z
DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20200202T120000Z
DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20200127T084346Z
UID:20190827/7380-458195/effectivetours.com
DESCRIPTION:[BASE64 DATA]
END:VEVENT
It’s hard to overestimate the impact of this small addition. Now you can build your own PMS and hospitality solutions without building complicated API integration. We do have our own PMS API and of course it’s hard to compare the full PMS API functionality with Extended iCal but there is still plenty of scopes for this solution.
To activate Extended iCal feature please contact our support team. Detailed specification and workflow you will find in Extended Ical documentation.
Extended iCal is in beta stage now. We will add encryption of the data to provide maximum security for the sensitive information.
Use cases
Property management company
Airbnb is no doubts number one OTA for home, villa and apartment rentals. Plenty of owners feel comfortable with Airbnb only and don’t want to deal with any other OTA. More of that, they don’t marketing their property and a results having occupancy between less than 50%.
With Extended iCal you can create a separate account for that property, link it to Airbnb and then create your own account with the same property on it linked to the original one via Extended iCal. As soon as it’s done, you will get a new property in your own Effective Tours account, fully synced with original property. Now you can create a Booking & Expedia listings for this property and even create a new Airbnb Listing for it and start promoting it your way. Each time you are generating a new booking — it will block the dates on the original property and vice versa.
Owner selling on Airbnb, doing all the marketing for his listing. Agent (You) sync Owners property via Extended iCal and then start marketing his own way in all OTA he wants. All bookings are fully synchronized. With the support of Effective Tours payment gateway, owner can receive advance payment to secure the bookings.
Property management solution
Hospitality business is on the rise and there is a lot of new players coming to the place daily. Channel manager is always a core of that systems as it allows to manage hotel rates & availability across all of the distribution channels. You have to create an API integration with at least one of them to be competitive on the market. Unfortunately, all big channel managers are not interested in a small startups. Same time the API integration is not so easy. With extended iCal you can pull/push all the most important information between your app and Effective Tours with just few lines of code.
Just few startup ideas where Extended iCal is more than enough and a full-fledged API is not required. Needless to say, that we also have a rich PMS API which you can use, in case if you feel that you need it.
– Guests relations
– Property management
– Staff management
– Accounting and Financial audit
Migrating between listings
If you have old listing with any OTA and want to migrate to the new one it’s always a headache but not with ET. You can add both listings to ET, sync them with Extended iCal and smoothly migrate to a new listings without a risk of overbooking.