How to connect Google Calendar

Where can I find it? More >>> Google Calendar

In this article, we explain how to link your account to Google Calendar. By integrating your booking system, you’ll be able to do the following:

• Real-time synchronisation: Instantly view bookings that are entered in your TuriTop dashboard.
• Team collaboration: Share the calendars for all your services with up to 10 email addresses.
• Automated management: Set up notifications and reminders to organise your bookings more efficiently.

Synchronisation works in one direction only: data is sent exclusively from TuriTop to Google Calendar. It is therefore not possible to create events or bookings in Google Calendar and have them reflected in TuriTop. This two-way limitation is due to the fact that Google Calendar does not have TuriTop’s advanced business rules, such as minimum booking times, blocked time slots, resource management, rates or discount vouchers. Allowing editing from Google Calendar would cause conflicts in the system due to the lack of critical data.

Preliminary Checks

• Ensure all services created on TuriTop are set to your own time zone:

Go to Company >>> Default Settings and confirm it matches your time zone. In case you are not using by default the configuration set in Company in your Services, you will need to make these changes on each Service Default Settings.

• Ensure the Event duration is properly configured for each Service:

To ensure that Google Calendar displays the duration of each event/booking correctly, you must specify the duration of each service under Service Details >>> Event Duration.

This applies only to Tour/Activity-type services.

• Ensure the email has access to Google Calendar:

If you have never accessed Google Calendar with your Gmail account, the integration with TuriTop will not work. You need to have used it at least once.

Once all these requirements are checked, you can now sync Google Calendar with your TuriTop booking system.

Instructions

Step 1: Activate Google Calendar on TuriTop

First, go to the More tab >>> Google Calendar and toggle the option "Activate Google Calendar".

Once it’s active, you will be able to enter the email address with which you wish to share your booking system’s calendar.

Once you have added the email address, you will see it in a box below. Here you can view all the email addresses with which you share your calendar.

You can only add a maximum of 10 Gmail accounts to synchronise with Google Calendar.

You will now need to select the email address you wish to share so that the services you want to synchronise with that email’s calendar appear.

Next, simply select the services you want to synchronise with this email address and click "Add". Once the service has been added, just wait for it to synchronise with Google Calendar.

It usually takes up to 7 seconds to insert a booking in Google Calendar. So, please, be patient and do not close your browser tab until this process has been completed. This waiting time is set by Google Calendar itself and not by Turitop.

In addition, you can also choose how the event title is displayed on the calendar. You have two options:

1. Customer full name and PAX quantity
2. Product name and PAX quantity

If the client name is not specified, the service name will be used by default.

Step 2: Add the Calendar

Once you have been granted access to the calendar, look out for the notification email confirming that it has been shared and click on "Join the shared calendar".

Step 3: Go to Google Calendar

Now open Google Calendar. Once you’re in, you’ll see that the service has synchronised correctly.

In the monthly view, your bookings will be displayed in the following format: [Time] [ShortID] - [Booking number]

You will also find your service in the left-hand menu, under the "Other calendars" section, labelled in the format ShortID_Service, as shown in the image below:

When you click on any of your bookings in Google Calendar, a pop-up window will appear showing a summary of the details and a link labelled "Edit/view booking".

When you click on this link, the system will redirect you to the Bookings tab in your TuriTop control panel. To find the specific booking you were viewing in Google Calendar, simply enter its reference number/ID in the manual search field.

Information available in the booking

The customer details displayed in this section will depend on the fields you have configured in your booking form (under Company or Services >>> PX (specific service) >>> Booking Form).

Currently, the form fields that can be displayed here are:

• Full name
• Telephone number
• Email
• Custom HTML (1 to 5)
• Comments
• Custom question (1 to 4)

At present, the other fields in the form are not supported.

In addition, you will always have access to the following general booking details: date, time, booking ID, ticket summary, total amount, status and payment method.

Calendar Preferences

To customise these options, go to the menu on the left-hand side of Google Calendar, find your service, click on the three dots and select Settings.

In this settings window, you can edit the following aspects of the calendar:

• Service name.
• Access permissions and calendar colour.
• Time zone.
• Add and customise different types of notifications.

Notifications

You can enable email notifications for new events, updated events, cancelled events, event replies and your daily schedule. For more information, please see the Google Calendar documentation via this link.

Color

You can change the colour of your service in this window.

The colour you choose will be the background colour for each booking associated with that service.

Troubleshooting

Errors when granting permissions

If the system displays an error when you try to grant access, check that the email account in question has logged in and accessed Google Calendar at least once before.

You haven’t received the invitation email

If you cannot find the email to add the service, check your Spam or junk mail folder. Bear in mind that if you manage several services, Google is very likely to group all invitations into a single email thread; you can try looking for them under the subject line "Accept your invitation to join the shared calendar".

Display errors after linking

If you linked the calendar before completing the preliminary checks and the data is now displaying incorrectly, follow these steps to resolve the issue:

1. Go to More >>> Google Calendar within your TuriTop panel.
2. Remove the current links or emails.
3. Correct the relevant settings.
4. Re-add the services to restart the synchronisation from scratch.