Instant Book and multiple listing sites

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I saw the banner a few weeks ago about “Now Instant Book hosts can cancel without penalty if the dates should have been blocked” (or something like that).

I’ve had instant book enabled for my listing for months, and I only get a few bookings through AirBnB and only about half of those are instant book. I’m thinking about going to Instant Book on my main listing site (VRBO), but don’t want to risk double bookings. We are a fairly expensive property, so we don’t get inundated with multiple bookings requests/inquiries on a regular basis, but I’m deathly afraid of a double-booking. At the same time, it’s been drilled into me that if we don’t have IB turned on, no one on AirBnB will ever see us.

Here’s my question. If I get “Instant” booked on AirBnB a very short time after I get booked on a different website, can I cancel the AirBnB booking without penalty since the dates “should have been blocked”? I’m pretty on top of things and it usually would not be more than an hour or so between getting a booking on the other site and blocking off the AirBnB dates (barring a booking at 2 AM in the morning). We are not SuperHosts and most likely will never be (too few bookings), so that’s not my worry.

Thoughts? I know the easy answer is to turn off IB on AirBnB, but I am hoping I can have my cake and eat it, too…

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I’m not sure about this, but the “should have been booked” may refer to if you’ve blocked the dates but Air have accidentally unblocked them, which has happened to a few of us.
Anyone else here tried the “should have been blocked” reasoning with Air?

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Just Sync your calendars on the different sites.

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@Brandt - syncing calendars is not instantaneous. I am listed on Booking.com, and they only sync three times a day. I’m only concerned about how to handle the unlikely occurrence of overlapping bookings that come in within 20-30 minutes of each other.

Does anyone have experience with how quickly (or slowly) AirBnB and HomeAway sync the calendars between the sites?

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Some people use hostaway and that syncs within a few minutes. That is the quickest I have heard. Although, it still leaves a few minutes for another booking to overlap.

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IS that true, booking.com only sync 3 times a day.

I have been having problems with double bookings with just booking.com but that could explain why.

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I spoke to a Booking.com representative about when the calendars sync, and she told me about every 8 hours.

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I am using Hostaway but it’s possible to save some money with beds24 (same quick sync)

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@pitonview is VRBO good? u think better than ABB?