Connect Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo step by step

By GuestChat Team · 2 October 2026

Connecting a booking site sounds like a five-minute chore, and often it is. But each site connects in its own way, and people who rush it often end up with an amber cell and no idea why. Here's the full path, site by site.

Where you do it

In Settings, in the Booking channels section. You'll see a grid: your properties in rows and the booking sites in columns. Each cell tells you in one word how that property is doing on that site, and it has at most one button: the next step that's up to you.

Today you can connect Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo. Below them you'll see other sites marked Coming soon: they're shown grayed out and can't be clicked, because we only connect what has been tested end to end.

Airbnb: no passwords

You connect Airbnb by giving permission on Airbnb's own website. We never see your password.

If you have another program connected to your Airbnb account, remove it first. Airbnb only allows one, and it affects your whole account.
Click Connect in the Airbnb column. An Airbnb window opens with your host session.
Accept. The window closes by itself and the grid updates without you doing anything.

Messages from your Airbnb guests arrive in Conversations. The AI only replies to messages that arrive from that moment on, never to old ones.

Booking.com: your property's ID number

Booking.com needs one step first, in its extranet (the site where you manage your Booking.com property):

Log in to the extranet with your property's account.
Go to Account, then Connectivity provider, and type "Channex" in Search. Select it and accept the terms.
Copy your property's ID number, the one shown at the top next to its name, and paste it into the dashboard.

Booking creates one connection per property: if you have three apartments on Booking, you repeat this with each one's number.

Vrbo: owner account and a code by text message

Use the owner account, the one for your host dashboard. The traveler account won't work.
If you log in to Vrbo with the Google button, that account doesn't have its own password: set one using "Forgot password?" on Vrbo.
The password is only used to log in to your Vrbo session, through the connectivity provider, and it isn't stored in the dashboard.
Keep your phone handy: Vrbo sends a code by text message to the account owner.
Remove any calendar the listing has imported from somewhere else, because it would overwrite what we send.

With Vrbo, bookings, prices and availability are synced. Photos, the description and the house rules are still edited on Vrbo, and messages from Vrbo guests don't reach the dashboard yet.

The two steps people forget

Connecting the account isn't enough. Each cell still has two more steps:

Link property: telling the booking site that this listing is this property. The list shows you the full name of each listing so you don't pair one with the wrong one.
Turn on: until you turn it on, nothing is sent to the booking site. That's on purpose: it lets you review before publishing.

In each cell's panel you also have Fetch bookings that already exist and Fetch older conversations, which are handy on day one.

Before you turn it on, check

That the property has a base price in the Calendar. Without a starting price, the booking site won't publish a single night, even if the connection looks fine.
That the paired listing is the right one: a crossed pairing would publish one apartment's prices on another.
That no other program is still managing that listing. It's one of the most common causes of double bookings.

When the cell says Published, you're done. If it says something else, the text itself tells you what's missing.