Contents
Calendar sync - Plugixa Car Rental
Calendar sync PRO works with iCalendar (.ics) links, the format every calendar app and most booking sites understand. It does three things:
| Part | Direction | For |
|---|---|---|
| Your team’s calendar | Out | Every rental, with the customer’s details, in your staff’s calendar app |
| Each car’s availability | Out | One link per car that shows only when it is taken, for another site that rents the same car |
| Bookings from other sites | In | Another site’s calendar for a car, read every hour, so the car cannot be booked here at those times |
Open it under Plugixa Car Rental -> Settings -> Calendar sync. Changes on this screen take effect at once; there is nothing to save. Calendar sync is an app, on by default in Pro; if the section is missing, switch it on in the App manager.
Your team’s calendar
“Subscribe to this link in Google Calendar (Other calendars -> From URL), Outlook or Apple Calendar to see every rental there, with the customer’s details. It updates on its own.”
Copy the Team calendar link with the copy button and add it to your
calendar app as a subscription (in Google Calendar: Other calendars, +,
From URL). The link looks like your site’s address followed by
/calendar/team/ and a long code, ending in .ics. Always copy it from this
screen.
Each rental is one event:
| Event field | Holds |
|---|---|
| Title | The reference, the car (model and plate) and the customer’s name, e.g. “ADR-2026-0013 · Fiat 500 (AA-21-BC) · Emily Chen” |
| Start and end | Pickup and return |
| Location | The pickup location |
| Description | “Returned at …” for a one-way rental, the customer’s phone and email, and a link to the booking in the admin |
| Status | Confirmed, or Cancelled for a cancelled or no-show booking |
It covers bookings that are Confirmed, Picked up, Returned, Completed, Cancelled or No-show, from two months ago to eighteen months ahead (up to 5,000 events). Pending bookings are left out: they last minutes and would only flicker in a calendar.
To see only one pickup location, add ?location= and the location’s ID to the
end of the link, for example ...ics?location=2.
The feed tells calendar apps to check again every 15 minutes, but each app decides for itself. Google Calendar in particular can take several hours to refresh a subscribed calendar. Use it to see the day ahead, not to catch a booking made a minute ago.
Keep this link private. The screen warns: “Anyone with this link can see your bookings, including customer names, phone numbers and emails. Share it only with your team.” Calendar apps cannot sign in, so the link itself is the password.
Each car’s availability
“Renting the same car on another site? Give that site the car’s link: it shows only when the car is taken, never who has it.”
Each car in your fleet has its own link, labelled with its model and plate. Give it to the other site (an agency, a marketplace) where it asks for an iCal or calendar import for that vehicle.
A car’s feed has one event per booking of that car, titled Unavailable, with no customer, price or reference in it. It covers bookings that are Confirmed, Picked up, Returned or Completed, from a week ago to two years ahead.
It does not contain what was imported from other sites. Sending a site its own bookings back would make two calendars echo each other.
If you have no cars yet, the card says “Add cars to your fleet to get a link for each one.”
Bookings from other sites
“Paste the iCal (.ics) export link another site gives you for a car. Its bookings then make the car unavailable here. Links are read every hour; if one cannot be read, the last busy times it gave are kept, so an outage elsewhere never frees a car.”
Adding one
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Car | The car (vehicle with its plate) this calendar is for. Each import is for one car. |
| Name | Optional, “e.g. Partner agency”. Without one, the link’s host name is used. |
| Calendar link | The export link from the other site. https://, http:// and webcal:// links are accepted. |
Press Add. The link is read straight away and the screen reports “Calendar added and read: 4 busy times found.” or “Calendar added, but it could not be read:” followed by the reason.
The list
| Column | Shows |
|---|---|
| Car | The car it blocks |
| Name | Your name for it |
| Last read | A Read chip, or Could not read in red with the reason; the time of the last attempt, or “Not read yet” |
| Busy times | How many busy periods the last good read found |
Read now reads a link at once. Stop importing removes it after a confirmation: “Its busy times are removed, so the car can be booked here for those dates again.”
The screen shows only the host and the last few characters of each link: the link is the other site’s secret.
How busy times are read
- Every event in the calendar is a busy time for that car, from its start to its end.
- An all-day event blocks the car from your site’s midnight to the next.
- A time with no time zone is taken in your site’s time zone.
- Events marked cancelled, or marked as free time, are skipped.
- Events that ended more than a day ago are ignored.
- “Repeating events are read as their first occurrence only. Booking sites send one event per booking, so this rarely matters.”
While a busy time lasts, that car is left out when the booking form and the admin look for a free car of its model. If the model has another free car, the customer can still book; if not, the model shows as not available for those dates. A busy time never cancels or moves a booking already made here.
When a link cannot be read
Links are read hourly, up to 25 per run, the most overdue first. A link that fails (the other site is down, answers with an error, or returns a web page instead of a calendar) is marked Could not read, and the busy times from its last good read stay in place. Only a successful read replaces them, including a read that finds the calendar genuinely empty.
| Message | Meaning |
|---|---|
| “The calendar could not be reached. Check the link, or try again later.” | No answer, or the address could not be found. |
| “The calendar link answered with an error (HTTP 404).” | The other site refused the request. |
| “That link does not return a calendar. Copy the iCal or .ics export link, not the address of the web page.” | The link is a web page. |
| “Paste the calendar link the other booking site gives you: a public web address starting with https://, http:// or webcal://.” | The link is not a public web address. Links to this server or the local network are refused. |
Hourly reading relies on WordPress’s scheduled tasks. On a site where WP-Cron is switched off, make sure a real cron job runs it.
Create new links
If a link has been shared with someone who should not have it, press Create new links. The confirmation explains: “Every link on this page changes: the team calendar and each car’s. Calendars and sites using the old links stop updating until you give them the new ones.”
The old links stop working at once. Subscribe your calendar app again and give each site its car’s new link.
What is sent where
The outgoing links are read by whoever has them: your calendar app’s servers, or the other booking site. The team link carries customer names, phone numbers and emails; car links carry only busy times.
Reading an import makes an ordinary request for the link you pasted, once an hour. No booking or customer data is sent with it. Each service works under its own terms. Requests to the outgoing links are rate limited per address (240 an hour), generously enough for any calendar app.