Hostberg doesn't have live API sync with Airbnb or Booking.com yet. Bookings come in from forwarded confirmation emails or manual entry. That's worth saying plainly rather than burying it, partly because it's true and partly because it's a real thing to weigh against platforms that do have it — so here's what that gap actually costs, honestly, and what it doesn't.
What it costs: a few minutes per booking, forwarding or typing in what a real API sync would pull automatically. At low booking volume — a villa doing a handful of reservations a week — that's genuinely a few minutes a day, not a burden most hosts will notice. At higher volume across several properties, it adds up into real admin time, and that's a fair reason to weigh a platform with live sync more heavily if your volume is already there.
What it doesn't cost, contrary to how it sounds: same-day accuracy. A booking that arrives by forwarded email and gets entered within minutes closes the same double-booking window that an API sync closes — the mechanism that actually prevents double bookings is speed of propagation, not the specific transport it travels over. A slow manual process is worse than API sync. A fast manual process running within the same day isn't meaningfully different in outcome, even though it sounds like it should be.
Where the real difference shows up is in error rate, not speed. A human typing a booking in can transpose a date or a room number; an API pulling structured data directly can't make that specific mistake, though it can fail silently in its own ways (a webhook that stops firing without anyone noticing, for instance). Neither path is error-free — they just fail differently.
We're building toward direct API sync because it removes the few-minutes-per-booking cost entirely once volume justifies it, and because it's the honest long-term answer for multi-property hosts. Until it ships, the accurate claim is the one we're making: same-day manual entry, not a background pull — and for a single villa or two, that's close enough to the same outcome that it shouldn't be the deciding factor on its own.