How often does the ical get synced in Houfy

Houfy pulls in your imported calendars in two ways, and the one that matters in practice is immediate.

When someone opens your listing's calendar or starts to book it, Houfy re-checks that listing's imported calendars right then. There is a short cooling-off period of about 15 minutes per listing, so that a busy page cannot hammer the other site's server, but for practical purposes the calendar you are looking at has just been refreshed.

Behind that, Houfy sweeps every ten minutes for any listing whose imported calendars have not been checked in the last three hours, and refreshes those too. So even a listing nobody has looked at is never much more than three hours out of date.

You do not need to leave a buffer on same-day availability. Opening the calendar refreshes it.

How can I manually sync?

You can also refresh one imported calendar on demand. Go to Manage Listings, open the listing, click Calendar, click Import in the toolbar, open the Synced tab, and click the circular-arrows Sync now icon on the row for that calendar.

What about the other direction?

If you get a booking on Houfy, it is up to Airbnb or VRBO to pull that booking in from the Houfy calendar you exported to them, on their own schedule. You can usually force that from their calendar dashboard.

It is our understanding that Airbnb pulls roughly every 2 hours and VRBO up to 6, but those are their systems and their timings rather than ours - check with them if it matters to you.