Why do two back-to-back Booking.com reservations show as one long block in iCal?

The shape of the problem

Guest A stays the 8th to the 13th. Guest B stays the 13th to the 12th of the following month. Booking.com's calendar has the property closed continuously from the 8th, so its export may emit one event, 8th to 12th, under one UID. Two consequences:

1. The checkout on the 13th — the one that needs a cleaner — is not in the feed anywhere.
2. If the merged block exceeds 30 nights, a duration rule that says "long, nameless block = owner closure" will skip it entirely, and a tracked reservation underneath can be silently cancelled.

Lemon's incident log has exactly this case (INC-5, September 2026): two real stays, 5 nights plus 30 nights, exported as one 35-night block. The first stay was cancelled with no cancellation source and no decision record, which is the signature of a duration skip rather than the auto-cancel engine. It was found, fixed and restored the same day.

How Lemon handles a merged block now

• Refuse the widen. If a tracked booking's own UID widens to swallow another stay, Lemon does not apply the date change. It refreshes "last seen" and leaves the booking and its cleaner alone.
• Defer the duration skip. A normal-length tracked reservation whose block balloons past 30 nights routes to the reshape guard first, instead of being guillotined by the owner-closure rule.
• Surface uncovered nights. Any nights inside the merged block that no tracked booking covers are shown to the host as a pending_review item under a stable synthetic ID keyed on the block's checkout. The host answers once: real stay, or not.
• Promote when the feed splits it again. If Booking.com later exports the real reservations separately, the placeholder adopts the real event (synthetic_promoted) rather than blocking it.

What a host should do

Nothing, in the normal case: the first stay keeps its cleaner. If you see a "nights nobody has claimed" card on the dashboard, answer it — that is the second stay asking to exist. If you know two stays are back to back, a direct PMS connection removes the ambiguity entirely, because the reservation objects arrive separately.