What this does

Checkinea can read booking-confirmation emails you forward from Airbnb or Booking.com and create the booking automatically — often with more detail than iCal sync alone can give you, since an iCal feed never carries the guest's name. This feature is currently marked Experimental in Settings, so treat it as a helpful extra signal alongside iCal rather than your only source of bookings.

Your booking email address

Go to Settings. If email forwarding is available on your account, you'll see a Booking email address card with your personal inbound address and a Copy address button. This address is unique to your account — forward emails to it, don't share it publicly.

Which emails are read

Only two senders are recognised today:

• Airbnb — booking-confirmation emails (from automated@airbnb.com).
• Booking.com — the "¡Nueva reserva!" new-booking notification and the first guest-message notification (from booking.com / guest.booking.com addresses).

Other OTAs, and other kinds of Airbnb/Booking.com emails (cancellations, modifications, etc.), aren't parsed.

What you get depends on which email you forward

Airbnb confirmation emails carry the reservation code, dates, the lead guest's name, party size, and price breakdown — enough for Checkinea to create the booking directly, without the "add details" step an iCal-only booking candidate needs. You'll still add a phone number, nationality, and ID document before filing with SES — forwarding doesn't carry those either.

Booking.com sends two relevant emails at different points:

• The initial "¡Nueva reserva!" notification is thin — only the booking number and check-in date — so Checkinea files it as a booking candidate that shows up under "Needs details" on your Bookings page until you fill in the rest.
• The notification for the guest's first message is richer — it includes the guest's name, the check-out date, total number of guests, and a masked reply-to email address for the guest — so Checkinea can create the full booking directly from that one, the same as it does for Airbnb.

Setting up forwarding in Gmail

Create a filter or forwarding rule that matches the OTA's sender address — automated@airbnb.com for Airbnb, noreply@booking.com for Booking.com — and forwards matching mail to your Checkinea address above. You can also forward individual emails by hand.

For Booking.com, don't add your Checkinea address as an extra contact directly in the extranet — that stops your own inbox from receiving confirmations. Set up the forwarding rule in your own mailbox instead.

Gmail may ask you to verify the destination address before it will forward to it. If it does, the verification email lands at your Checkinea address and Checkinea surfaces it back to you in Settings, with a confirmation code (if Gmail included one) and a button to confirm the forwarding rule. If Gmail never asks for verification, there's nothing else to do.

Privacy

Checkinea only reads a forwarded email to extract what's needed to create the booking — guest name, party size, dates, and confirmation code. The email itself isn't stored, and nothing else is kept.

Working alongside iCal

Email forwarding and iCal sync are meant to run together, not replace each other. If both eventually see the same reservation, Checkinea recognises it by property, channel, and reservation code and keeps a single booking rather than creating a duplicate — whichever signal arrives first creates the booking, and the other fills in or confirms it rather than overwriting details you've already reviewed and confirmed by hand.