The short answer
Airbnb and Booking.com update their calendar links on their own schedule. That can take a few minutes or a couple of hours, and you cannot change it. Lemon checks every connected calendar every 5 minutes, day and night. So once the platform shows a new checkout, the cleaning job appears in Lemon within about five minutes.
Two delays, not one
There are two delays between a guest booking and a cleaner knowing about it:
- The platform's delay. Airbnb and Booking.com refresh their calendar links 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 calendar) are widely reported to take hours.
- Your software's delay. A tool only learns about a change when it next checks the calendar.
You cannot speed up the first one. You can make the second one short.
What this means for your cleaner
A new checkout becomes a cleaning job on the next check. Offers to cleaners begin two weeks before checkout by default, so for a normal booking the five minutes never matter. They matter for last-minute bookings and same-day changes, which is where checking often earns its keep.
When a calendar glitches
Checking often also means Lemon sees a platform's hiccups quickly. If Airbnb or Booking.com briefly sends an empty calendar, or drops half its bookings at once, Lemon does not cancel your cleaners' jobs. It treats the glitch as a failed read and waits for the calendar to recover.
Practical advice
- Connect each platform's own calendar link to the property in Lemon. Do not rely on Airbnb passing on Booking.com's bookings: they arrive later, with the second platform's delay added on top.
- If you take last-minute bookings, use a direct PMS connection where you can. Hospitable, Guesty and Hostaway send changes to Lemon straight away, so a new reservation arrives in seconds rather than on the next check.
Technical details
- Every organisation's iCal 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. Airbnb and Booking.com regenerate the.icsfile on their own schedule. - 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.
- An empty feed is treated as a failed fetch (nothing changes). Lemon 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.
- 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.
- Hospitable, Guesty and Hostaway push changes by webhook.