Nomad Stays provides bookings for rooms that can be sold instantly.

There are no ‘request’ facilities that allow a member to request room availability if it’s not listed.

It is therefore vitally important to keep your room inventory up to date in our system.

There are 4 common ways this is done around the world.

1. iCal synchronisation
2. MCP Server synchronisation (new)
3. Extranet
4. Channel Manager
5. Cohost

1. iCal Synchronization

iCal is short of iCalendar, the name of a technology that allows calendars shared on the internet to be read by systems and calendaring applications.

Typically calendars in the travel industry are for individual rooms or apartments.

Nomad Stays support iCal ‘feeds’ from Airbnb today and are testing other iCal based suppliers presently (VRBO, Booking.com etc.).

See full list of tested iCal suppliers

What this means is that if you tell us the address (URL) of your Airbnb iCal then our system can pull your blocked dates from Airbnb automatically.  This in turn means you don’t need to use our Extranet to update your availability.  It is just updated shortly after your Airbnb Calendar gets updated.

NB: The iCal feed is one-way at present.  Bookings we make for you are sent to you via email and you’ll need to let Airbnb know that the dates have been booked.

2. MCP Server

MCP Servers are form of AI friendly server that allows AI Agents to push or pull information between MCP enabled websites.

AI agents can read the specifications from an MCP server and format the data to send to the server. They are considerably easier, faster and cheaper to deploy than the old way of setting up individual APIs between servers.

Nomad Stays can either pull your availability data from your MCP server or accept your ‘pushes’ of data to our MCP server.

Typically your MCP Server would push updates to us after changes meaning updates are instant.

When we have to ‘pull’ the data from your server there is a typical delay like you find in iCal syncing. We will poll your server every hour or so, which means updates on your server are not instantly seen my us.

MCP Server integration can be used with both Boutique and Commercial clients.

3. Extranet

Today, like most OTAs we use an ‘extranet’ system that allows you to log in and update your inventory. This is part of our Commercial system.

For instance, if you have only 1 room available and it gets booked on another platform, then you’ll need to update Nomad Stays by logging in and ‘blocking out’ that room for the dates. Bookings made on Nomad Stays automatically reduce your availability but it’s likely that you’ll need to update other OTAs extranets as well for the reduced availability.

To use our Extranet, you simply:

1. Click the “Update Availability” button for your stay from the Your Stays page.
2. Choose the Room Type you wish to change
3. Set the new number of rooms
4. Optionally set a limited date range this new allocation applies for

That’s it. 

4. Channel Manager

For larger properties this is very time consuming so they typically use systems known as Property Management Systems (PMS) and sometimes use “Channel Managers”.

PMS are system you have ready inside your property while Channel Managers are usually cloud based systems that manage the inventory allocation for a range of external OTA.

We expect to be able to offer you a range of Channel Manager options in the future.

5. Cohost

A Cohost is a human management service where someone else manages all or some of the operations of your Stay.

Cohosts are likely to be located near your property and typically offer a range of services including:

• Updating of inventory on OTA websites
• Meeting and greeting guests
• Changing sheets and doing laundry
• Cleaning rooms and replacing broken & missing items

They are called cohosts as you can generally work out how much of the work you do and how much they do.