The one label Booking.com gives you
Open a Booking.com .ics export and every event looks like this: a SUMMARY of CLOSED - Not available, a DTSTART, a DTEND, and a UID. There is no guest name, no reservation number, no status, and no distinction between a paying guest and a night you closed yourself. Airbnb's export is slightly richer — it says "Reserved" for guest stays and "Airbnb (Not available)" for blocks — but Booking.com's is not.
For a cleaning schedule this is the central problem. A checkout on a real reservation needs a cleaner. A block you set for painting does not. The feed cannot tell them apart, so the software has to.
How Lemon separates them
Lemon treats a Booking.com generic block as a reservation by default, because the cost of missing a real checkout (a guest walks into a dirty flat) is far higher than the cost of a cleaner visiting an empty one. On top of that it applies duration and shape rules:
| Signal | Interpretation |
|---|---|
| Block longer than 30 nights, no guest name | Owner closure — skipped, no job |
| Block longer than 90 nights, even with a name | Held for host review, never auto-confirmed |
| Block that widens to swallow a stay Lemon already tracks | Merged block — the tracked stay keeps its job; extra nights are surfaced as a question |
| Short block (up to 3 nights) adjacent to an owner closure | Split tail of the closure — skipped |
| Everything else | A reservation with a checkout cleaning |
When the rules cannot decide, the booking goes to a pending_review state on the host dashboard instead of an automatic action. The host answers "real stay" or "not a stay" once.
Why this cannot be fully solved from the feed
Booking.com's export is byte-identical for a host-set closure and a guest booking. Lemon documents this as a fundamental ambiguity rather than a bug: the only way to know for certain is a direct connection to the property management system, which carries the reservation object itself. That is why Lemon supports both iCal and direct connections to Hospitable, Guesty and Hostaway.