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Miguel is right.
You are controlling the nightly rate you want, but not the amount the guest is paying.
Booking is re-implementing the “lowest price guarantee” out of their own pocket, and by doing this pulling the guest away from the competition.
If you prefer getting guest trough AirBnB but list on both platforms, and you encourage guest to book through AirBnB by differentiating pricing, Booking is countering that.
You might not care as long as the money is coming, but it makes you vulnerable as you will get more and more dependant on a single platform. Just like people only hosting on AirBnB.
PS - thanks for the heads up Miguel if we used BDC its something we would def check to make sure we still received the minimum payment we require to make it attractive enough for us to take bookings …
My “selling price” is the price that I effectively sell nights to BDC, Airbnb etc, to sell on their web sites. If an individual OTA wants to implement a promotion, as long as it doesn’t affect our bottom line, they’re more than welcome.
From our perspective, it hasn’t driven any guests away from Airbnb, in fact it’s the opposite. Our Airbnb business has increased substantially this year.
If BDC want to get into a dog fight for business with the other OTA’s… great, crack on guys. Let’s see if Airbnb respond, although one can almost guarantee that they’d be looking for the hosts to fund it!
We list on three of the main OTA’s (plus their subsidiaries) and have a healthy direct clientele, many of them were initially OTA guests. In addition, we market via social media locally which, as the years go by, brings in more and more business (thanks to @jaquo for that tip a few years ago).
From being (like many others) totally dependent on Airbnb initially, then BDC for a period, we now have a good spread across the various channels we use, apart from Vrbo of course
Why would you do that? If you had actually read the posts, you would have realised that you are in control of your nightly rate, not BDC.