This would be fantastic, and it is a common request for all online booking engines. You should know that HomeAway now owns VRBO (as well as VacationRentals.com, CyberRentals.com, GreatRentals.com, BedandBreakfast.com, and others). It is therefore possible (albeit very difficult) for them to provide synchronization among all of these.
HomeAway
UPDATE: yes they do, please scroll and read below.
HomeAway does not currently provide a published API for other services to synchronize with their calendars, so there really is no reliable way to accomplish this. We could develop a hack to read their public calendars, but this would be very fragile: easily broken if HomeAway makes even the slightest change to how it displays their calendars. Also, it would only be one-way: we could read their calendar and try to create bookings (or booking place-holders) on your Bookerville calendar, but when new bookings are made on your Bookerville calendar, we cannot make those appear on the HomeAway calendar.
Some other services say they provide this, but I would be very leary of these claims. Some of them require you to enter your VRBO/HomeAway credentials into their system, which means that they are somehow tricking HomeAway into thinking you are signing in, and submitting new requests to make bookings there. This is walking on very thin ice - both legally and technically - and is again very fragile, as all it would take is some new features or navigation within HomeAway's internal UI to cause this synchronization "technique" to fail.
The proper way to achieve this is with a published API, and as I understand it, HomeAway does not provide this. If anyone knows otherwise, please bring it to our attention as we are willing and eager to make use of it.
Here's a topic someone posted on HomeAway's forums about it: http://community.homeaway.com/thread/2743
Google
Google does provide a published API for interfacing with their calendar, and we are looking into this now. I will post updates to this topic when we learn more.
Thanks for the thought-provoking ideas Tom.
John
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