If I understand correctly, you received 2 reservations at the exact same time and both bookings were accepted by the system. How did this show up on your calendar? Were they R2B or IB? Did you cancel one of the reservations and get dinged for doing so? It seems odd that both reservation went through at the exact same time.

they refuse to take the ding and penalty off because they do not do it for sync issues

This does not sound like a sync issue, as that would apply only if the other booking was on a different site that did not have its calendary synced with your HA calendary. When both bookings were done as IB through HA it seems to be a problem with the HA programming accepting multiple bookings for the dates.

astraglam -

Is this the sequence of events?  1) you start revising your rates 2) a few minutes after you start revising your rates, you get a BOOKING from HA/VRBO for a week 3) and then, moments later, you get a BOOKING from HA/VRBO for a month that includes a portion of the days that were booked moments earlier.

(Edited at 6:50 AM central time to add) And by BOOKING I mean an instant book, not a reservation request.  Although HA has said a reservation request will block dates even while it is pending.

If that's the case, ask Erinn to help you, because the issue is not your rates but the HA/VRBO programming that allowed two overlapping instant bookings to happen. You cannot honor the second booking.

But about your rates, I'm not going to sugarcoat my response: if you did not have the right rates posted, you should either honor those rates or cancel the guest yourself and take the "ding".  If I was the person that booked your place for a month and now you tell me the price is twice and that I should cancel, I'd say no - and then I'd give you a bad review after staying for trying to raise the price on me.

Can you clarify further as it does seem a bit confusing still.

I am not comprehending how this all happened at the same time.

"I got a booking for my house on homeaway for a week a couple of days ago ".

Am I wrong in assuming there was at least a couple of days in between the 2 reservations?

How did you accept the first booking?

It seems as though it was days later then that the 2nd reservation....and IB you mentioned, came in for a full month and at your older rates.

Can you provide more detail on the chain of events and the processing?

astraglam -

One thing to keep in mind is that none of these websites sync immediately.  Unfortunately, you found that out the hard way.  Booking dot com said their calendar only syncs three times a day, and they won't forgive you for a double booking just because the calendars didn't sync - AND you have to pay to re-house the guest into a comparable or better property. 

I actually manually sync calendars between sites.  I don't trust them to sync quickly enough to protect us from a double booking.  So the first thing I do when I get a booking (not a request or inquiry) is to go to the other sites and either sync the calendar manually or block off the dates.  Then I reply to the guest.

The reason georgygirl1955 and I were asking for clarity on the events is that if HA truly had a bug and allowed bookings to overlap on their own platform, we'd recommend you escalate this (and why I suggested contacting Erinn).  You should not get punished by a cancellation for their programming problem.  But if you don't want to pursue it any longer, I recommend you cancel the month-long booking.  You don't get "dinged" harder on a one-month cancel than on a one-week cancel.