September 23, 2026
Google Calendar Sync: Your Hunts on Your Calendar
Ask a guide what they’re doing the second week of October and they won’t open your booking software. They’ll pull out their phone and look at their calendar — the one with their kid’s tournament on it, the dentist, the three days they told another outfitter they’d help pack in, and, if somebody remembered to type it in, your hunts. That calendar is the real schedule. The trouble is it lives in one place and your bookings live in another, and every double-booking an outfitter has ever untangled happened in the gap between the two. Hunt Outfitter now closes that gap from both ends: connect Google Calendar, and your hunts appear on your calendar automatically, while the days you’re busy in Google stop being bookable. Hunts are still managed in Hunt Outfitter; Google always shows the latest.
Two things move, in opposite directions
It’s worth being precise about what this is, because “calendar sync” can mean a lot of things. Two separate pieces of information travel, one each way. Your hunts go out: Hunt Outfitter writes the hunts you’re entitled to see into a calendar of its own in your Google account and keeps it current. Your busy time comes back: Hunt Outfitter asks Google when you’re busy — only whether you’re busy, never what you’re doing — and marks those days unavailable so nobody books you into them. What doesn’t happen is the thing people sometimes assume: editing a hunt in Google does not change the booking. The booking lives in Hunt Outfitter, and so does every change to it.
Your hunts, on a calendar Hunt Outfitter makes for you
When you connect, Hunt Outfitter creates one new calendar in your Google account, named for your outfit — “Hunt Outfitter — Ridgeline Outfitters,” say — and writes only into that one. Your own calendars are never written to — the permission it asks Google for can only change calendars it created itself. The new one shows up on your phone alongside everything else, in its own color, and you can hide it or show it like any other.
What lands there depends on who you are. An owner, admin or sales member sees every active booking plus the outfit’s shows and expos — the whole season at a glance, on the device they already check twenty times a day. A guide sees only the hunts they’re on, and no shows. Each hunt is an all-day entry with the client’s full name, the hunt type and the booking status in the title, and the booking code, guide, package and a link back to the booking in the details. That’s the whole list. No phone numbers, no email addresses, no medical notes and no client notes ever reach a Google calendar — the same line contact sync draws, for the same reason: this is someone’s personal account, not your client file.
It stays current without anyone thinking about it. A new booking appears within about an hour, a cancelled one disappears, a date change moves, and a resumed booking comes back. Hunts that have already happened stay put, so the season builds up behind you as it happens. The entries are also marked so they don’t count as “busy” in Google — a guide who merges calendars or shares this one elsewhere can never end up blocking themselves out of the very hunts they’re working.
Your busy days, keeping you from being double-booked
The other direction is the one that saves the phone call. If you guide, Hunt Outfitter reads the busy and free time on your main Google calendar every 15 minutes and turns it into days you can’t be booked. It reads busy and free only — event titles, guests and locations are never sent and never stored — so the outfit learns that you’re unavailable on the 14th, not why.
Not every appointment should cost you a hunt day, and the default rule is built around that. A day is blocked when you’re busy all day, or when a single commitment takes up four hours or more between 6 am and 6 pm. An 8 am-to-2 pm commitment blocks the day; a 7 pm dentist appointment doesn’t, and neither does a one-hour call. Each commitment is judged on its own, so two short meetings never add up to a lost day.
And when Google is wrong — the “busy” block was a placeholder, the plans fell through — you don’t have to go clean up your Google calendar first. One tap on that day in your Availability calendar keeps it open anyway. An override you set by hand always beats Google. If you want the change right now rather than at the next 15-minute read, Refresh busy days on the card does it immediately.
For an outfit that books online, this is where it pays off. A solo guide’s busy day stops being offered in the booking widget, which is the difference between declining an inquiry and refunding a deposit. On a bigger roster, a guide who’s busy simply isn’t counted as free that day — the outfit keeps booking with the guides who are. And a guide whose calendar is connected stops getting the monthly “please update your availability” reminder, because their availability is already updating itself.
Edit the booking, not the calendar entry
Because the booking is the source of truth, the calendar entries are a mirror of it, and a mirror doesn’t take instructions. If you drag a hunt to a different week in Google, or retype its title, Hunt Outfitter doesn’t read that back — it puts the entry back the way the booking says, within about a day on its own, or straight away if you press Sync now. That’s deliberate. A calendar anyone in the family can edit is a poor place to keep the only copy of a client’s dates. Change the booking in Hunt Outfitter, and every calendar follows.
Setting it up takes a minute
Everyone connects their own Google account — nobody can connect on someone else’s behalf, which is the point: it’s your calendar. Owners, admins and sales members find the Google Calendar card on My Account; guides find the same card on their Availability page. Click Connect, approve the two calendar permissions Google shows you, and you’re done. The Connect button names the outfit you’re in when you click, so a guide who works for more than one outfitter connects each one separately and always knows which one they’re connecting.
One thing to check if you’ve used Hunt Outfitter for a while: if you already subscribe to your calendar feed, it shows the same hunts this does, so keeping both means seeing every hunt twice. Pick one. The sync does everything the feed does and adds the busy days; the feed is still there for Apple Calendar and Outlook.
If you disconnect
Disconnecting stops both directions at once. Your upcoming hunts are removed from the Hunt Outfitter calendar in your Google account — a frozen hunt sitting on your phone that nothing updates any more is worse than none at all. The calendar itself stays, renamed with the date you disconnected, and it keeps your past hunts. Days you marked busy in Google stop blocking bookings right away.
Who it’s for
Google Calendar sync is included on the Solo, Pro, Business and Elite plans. It was built first for the solo guide who runs the whole operation off one phone and has no office manager to keep two calendars straight — but it earns its keep on a full roster too, where the owner stops chasing guides for availability and the guides stop getting booked on the day of their daughter’s wedding. See pricing for plan details, or read the full Google Calendar sync help article for every detail. Start free and connect your calendar once you’re on Solo or above.
Start free on the Starter plan — or try a paid plan free for 14 days.