# How often do Airbnb and Booking.com iCal feeds update, and how fast can cleaning software react?

Source: https://lemon.cy/learn/how-often-do-airbnb-and-booking-com-ical-feeds-update/  
Publisher: Lemon.cy (Red Tribe Media Ltd, Limassol, Cyprus)  
Updated: 2026-09-10 · Verified against production: 2026-09-10

**Short answer:** The platforms regenerate their iCal export on their own schedule — typically minutes to a couple of hours — and your software only sees changes as often as it fetches. Lemon re-reads every connected feed every 5 minutes (about 4,000 fetches a day across 18 feeds), so a new checkout becomes a cleaning job within one cycle of appearing.

## Two clocks, not one

There are two delays between a guest booking and a cleaner knowing about it:

1. **The platform's export clock.** Airbnb and Booking.com regenerate the `.ics` file periodically. Neither publishes a guaranteed interval; hosts commonly observe anything from a few minutes to a few hours, and platform-to-platform syncs (Airbnb reading Booking.com's feed) are widely reported to take hours.
2. **Your software's fetch clock.** A tool only learns about a change when it next downloads the feed.

You cannot speed up the first clock. You can make the second one short.

## What Lemon does

- Every organisation's feeds are fetched on a 5-minute loop (`icalSyncIntervalMinutes`, default 5), with a database advisory lock so only one server runs the sync at a time.
- Every fetch is snapshotted: in the 30 days to 2026-09-10 that was 129,351 fetches across 18 feeds — roughly 4,000 a day — observing 540,461 calendar events.
- A new checkout creates a cleaning job on the same cycle. Offers to cleaners begin two weeks before checkout by default, so the five-minute latency never matters for a normal booking; it matters for last-minute bookings and same-day changes, which is where a short fetch interval earns its keep.

## What five minutes does not fix

A short interval also means a feed glitch is seen quickly. If a feed briefly returns empty or drops half its events, a naive tool would cancel everything within minutes. Lemon treats an empty feed as a failed fetch (nothing changes), holds when more than half of a feed's future bookings vanish at once, and caps how much "absence" a single fetch can count towards a cancellation at 10 minutes, so an outage between syncs does not accumulate.

## Practical advice

- Connect the feed of the platform the guest booked on, not a feed of a feed. A Booking.com stay that reaches you via Airbnb's re-export of Booking.com's calendar arrives with a second platform's delay and a second platform's UID rules.
- If you run last-minute bookings, use a direct PMS connection where you can. Hospitable, Guesty and Hostaway send webhooks, so a new reservation reaches Lemon in seconds rather than on the next fetch.

## Related

- [iCal or a direct PMS connection — which is better for cleaning automation?](https://lemon.cy/learn/ical-vs-direct-pms-connection-for-cleaning-automation/)
- [What happens to the cleaning job when a guest gets a late checkout or extends?](https://lemon.cy/learn/late-checkout-and-guest-extension-handling/)
- [Why does my synced checkout date keep flipping between two dates?](https://lemon.cy/learn/ical-date-oscillation-checkout-flip-flop/)