How did that even happen? Is it specific to b.com openly allowing 3rd party? I’m not on there but investigating other channels and channel managers. This sort of thing makes me nervous.
On B.com, anybody can book for anyone. You can’t vet the booking.
My only free cancellation I managed to get, was when someone booked with children under 12. They tried to be sneaky and call them adults.
I now ring every reservation as soon as it happens and have a conversation with them.
The other huge negative is that I require either pre payment or a valid credit card. B.com don’t check the validity of the card - and neither do they let the host check it until it is close to the booking. They accept a random group of numbers…….
Oooooh, no no no. I can’t do that. I’m certain there are places suitable but I can’t roll like that. It stresses me out just thinking about it! 
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Deb, can you elaborate? I don’t have a clue how a third party such as B.Com works. My property is only listed on Air & VRBO. Don’t payments still have to go through Airbnb or VRBO?
yes - payments on those sites go through them.
On B.con you can choose how you are paid. BUT you cant change the payment method once chosen…believe me I have tried on 4 listings. They also want access to your bank account to get their invoices paid - that is also a NO from me.
As I said - No Vetting - anyone can book and anyone can show!
I have the strictest policies possible, when I was more flexible - B.con would be No shows, cancel at a whim and I would not get paid.
I don’t trust them at all.
I take payments up front so the guest has a commitment. I have allowed guests to cancel when they contact me.
What I resent is the ability to put in any random number as a C/card number that I cannot check - particularly same day bookings. It becomes an issue when the guest shows and I try to run the card and THEY TELL ME THE NUMBER IS FAKE and try to haggle a cash discount.
You really need to be on top of any B.con booking as they can be complicated.
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Ah, yeah, bet you don’t have to guess the reaction I have to that 
. Do you get a significant number of bookings (reliable ones) via them that it makes the risk worth it? It really sounds like a bummer. What is the upside?
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AS SOON AS I GET A B.con BOOKING-I Call them!
I establish how many and who is coming
If I can’t reach them, I call CS and ask them to call them. No response I request a cancellation.
It’s a booking- heads in beds.
I do a meet and greet with every booking and collect the payment.
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So B.com is super self-serve. What kinds of payment do you accept and do you take a deposit also? I’ll look at the website (was going to ask about reviews, etc. but I’ll do some research first :-))
A friend of mine who runs a small hostel tried out BDC for a very short while. She said she got the worst quality of guests through them she’d ever had in 20 years of running the hostel, (someone even stole her guitar) tons of no shows, and to top it off, she never got paid. After about a month of trying to get her money, she said never again.
I use Square.
Take note B.con like to PUSH discounts which really take the cream of the profit.
If you sign up for the Genius program, it works out to 10% off the top, then the 2% c/card fee and then the 15% commission.
I just got a marketing email from them saying I could sign up for a special Genius marketing offering 20% off.
THIRTY SEVEN % off!!!
And that’s a nope from me.
We have tried lots of “promo stuff” with BDC and got one booking in 2 years.
.
Here, they clearly push Hotel and Inn type stays. They seem to be more useful for STR in Europe.
YES! Oh, good lord, sorry I missed this mention 16 days ago. I get a hot feeling in my head just thinking about this whole story. Long story short: a woman booked my cottage for a wedding and said she was a friend of the couple and would be their phtographer. (First lie.) My security cameras revealed that I never saw her on the property. I did a little digging and turned out my guest had her own home rental platform called Theycay dot com. “Group vacations made simple.” She was re-renting not only my bedrooms but every flat sleeping surface as a bed at a tremendous markup. [See photo below.] Not only did she take all the photos off my listing she took some of my photos off of Flickr. She made copies of my keys and everything.
I called Airbnb and she was temporarily suspended but back on the platform in short order. In the end I contacted her “angel investors” in her project. What I WISH I had done was contact the NYS Board of Realtors because it turned out she was also a realtor. Her platform has since gone under.
Oh, man. There are lots of audacious tidbits I’m leaving out for the sake of brevity, but it was a watershed moment for me. I never felt the same about Airbnb CS again.
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From start to finish she was a complete and utter liar. A con artist who thought she as a “market disrupter.” Never, ever have I been so mad. It was also a lesson in exactly how much of myself I have poured into that cottage and the rental business because I went completely red-zone. If I catch a guest lying or shading the truth about their stay and what they are doing they are OUT. I don’t care if I have to refund them, they are OUT. @KKC and @konacoconutz can tell you. I don’t know what I would have done without their advice and insight regarding the whole matter. At least it brought these two extraordinary women into my life.
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And she spelled trailer wrong. 
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@aelilya here is the story about a third party rental I mentioned to you a couple of weeks ago.
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LOL! I didn’t even notice that I was so incensed.
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I’d be incensed as well. I once read a post where a young woman had booked a listing for herself, then the host saw that she had posted photos of his property on Instagram and was advertising some sort of workshop at $200/head for somethng like 20 people.
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The business model of Theycay was that you contacted them for a group event and they gathered “curated” accommodations. Mind you, without telling the property owners. If you went to their homepage you found nothing but a contact form. I googled the hashtag I found on this Instagram post (which made me realize they copied my house keys) and found the internal site page listing each bed in my house. The one thing I really wanted to do was go after her on social media but my friends talked me out of it. The fact that this post even still exists enrages me. … Maybe it’s the hammer that fell on my head earlier this week, but it still makes me 
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Ach, all you’d have had to do was say the magic word and she’d have been toast, and all by proxy 
It’d have been GAD, Glaswegian Assured Destruction.
JF
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I’m still stunned. Sis you get to keep your money and boot her people? Sounds like he didn’t find out until after the fact 