Beware of Booking.com as host

21

I would say that one advantage is also that guests can’t get money back due to exceptionnal reason as airbnb.

22

Did you mean to say cannot get money back? And you are talking about booking.com, right?

23

Yes I meant can’t for booking.com

24

I don’t recommend Booking.com for the reasons stated by OP. I am having the same issues and their customer service is poor.

25

I know this is an old post but I agree with the OP too we have had nothing but trouble with Booking…com

  1. We had just listed with them and the code was to be sent from Europe to our resort in the Philippines which would take a month or more. We spoke to them by phone and they approved our listing and bookings flooded in then 3 weeks later they blocked our listing because we hadn’t provided the code. I called them back and explained they had already approved us over the phone…cut a long story short they finally reopened our listing a week later and we had 18 cancellations in that time.

  2. We just took over this resort and renovated rooms, made 2 rooms into 1 Family room so added a new room listing and being the busiest time of year by the time i created the listing and edited the room calendar to fully booked a guest booked the room for NYE this was in the space of 10 mins. Of course i had to cancel the booking as the room is not available until Jan 20 and of course booking…com are giving me a hard time where to accommodate this guest. The island we are on is fully booked this time of year… Anyway booking is now claiming that my listing was already there 7 days before this guest booked and charging me. Total lie

Anyway I’m just going to use them like they use us and have listed my rooms fully booked for the next year and will keep the listing open for SEO

Airbnb bookings are solid anyway and much better to deal with. Happy new year !

26

I am using my channel manager if I didn’t had it will be a nightmare.

I am very careful with clients, pre charging all the cards etc… It’s working good (clients are paying much more compare to other providers)

27

Help! I don’t get it!

I listed on booking.com a few months ago and got a few reservations, first one arriving next week from Russia.

I see everyone talking about having to process the payments themselves. What?

I’ve activated “payments by booking.com” and it looks like they are collecting the payments before arrival, do I have to worry about this?

Thanks!

28

Can you explain about SEO and keeping the fully booked listing on the website? It won’t appear on anyone’s search results if booked right?

Or maybe search engines crawl booking.com and it boosts your views on other sites?

29

VRBO, HomeAway and Stayz are all the same platform now

30

Booking has its challenges but the traffic to the site is high and rates you can achieve are higher than Aibnb BUT they charge 15% so you have to adjust your pricing accordingly.

I use an app called GuestHug to intergrate my Airbnb,Booking and HomeAway calendars and automate my check-ins, saves me loads of time!