Problem with a VRBO guest's booking request and OwnerRez blocked calendar

VRBO Guest requested a booking (I have BIN), but I did not accept the booking since she complained about the VRBO fee in the booking request itself.

So, I manually entered an inquiry and sent her a quote through OwnerRez. When the guest tried to proceed with booking from her quote email, she received a message that the quote was no longer any good. I'm thinking this is because the OwnerRez calendar sync pulled in her tentative reservation from VRBO and blocked them on OwnerRez.

I have since removed the ical blocked dates on my calendar in hopes that when she tries again tomorrow her booking request will go through.

If anyone knows what I should do or not do now, please help! Thanks!!

I'll have a look at this. Can you send me the link for the VRBO iCal in question? I believe they're changing up some stuff with that sync, so we may need to adapt on our end.

Yep, looks like they are not following the tentative flag in the spec.

This was for 9/12-9/15 for Martina N., correct?

If so, I've made a hotfix to the calendar sync to work around this issue and flag tentative using other values in the iCal.

Chris,
Here is my VRBO iCal link:
http://admin.vrbo.com/icalendar/59531bf7123645279c323ae52a9458a6.ics

When I opened the tab to get the ical export link for you, I noticed a setting that I do not remember seeing before. There is a big green check mark next to these words... "Include Tentative Reservations in the calendar export"

I could have missed this setting before, but it's hard to keep up with VRBO's changes which are sneaked in from time to time.

So I unchecked the box and now the export link is:
http://admin.vrbo.com/icalendar/59531bf7123645279c323ae52a9458a6.ics?nonTentative

I suppose I will now need to enter the non-tentative link into my OwnerRez settings.

Let me know if you think this was the problem, or if it's something else.

Thanks!

Yep, that's exactly what the issue was -- tentative reservations were being mixed in with real ones. The iCal format has a Confirmed vs. Tentative flag for that (which we honor), but of course VRBO doesn't use that flag. Instead they put the word "Tentative" or "Reserved" somewhere in the iCal summary.

I've updated our calendar synchronizer to look at the event description and ignore events with the word "Tentative" in them. This should solve the issue regardless of which link you use.

Leave it to VRBO to make things difficult for everyone. Thanks so much for your quick response, Chris!