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For those of you that share your home - we have three kids and our guests stay in the lower level of our home, coming upstairs for breakfast -
Do you use other platforms to list your home? I was ready to go with booking.com but didn’t because they don’t require ID verification. I know ID verification is no guarantee, but it helps.
I tried Wimdu but didn’t have success. Also, I am on IB with airbnb, so was anxious about having to keep up more than one calendar. (We’ve discussed IB a lot - I have to say, initially it was fabulous, I had several IB bookings and it was so easy!! However, since then, almost no one uses it, they still write first and ask questions that are all answered in the ads - or even “what is the price?”.)
Any thoughts? I have been booking steadily into next year but now it got quiet. However, I remind myself that I didn’t even list until June of last year and was as busy as I wanted to be all year - so maybe I should just keep it simple and stay with air…
Meanwhile I’m walking around the house singing a little jingle “I’d really like to have a booking today, today, I’d really like to have one, right now…”
I have read that VRBO is allowing shared room spaces to list and specifically Washington DC was mentioned. You can sign up for their pay per booking and pay I believe 10%. I am not sure if that covers the credit card fees or not. But I would raise my rates by the 10% to see what rolls in.
They will be implementing traveler booking fees in June. When they do that, they are supposedly going to charge less commission to you. But they don’t verify ID either. And I do not know if VRBO is like Airbnb where once you are paid out then the money is yours. If your guest were to do a credit card charge back for whatever reason then VRBO may just take the money back from you. Not sure.
HomeAway and VRBO does not currently have a “shared space” rental category. In order to list on those sites you would have to be able to classify your place as an apartment or a studio, ie; completely self contained and with, at least, a private bath and entrance. That said, they probably would not do anything about it till they got a complaint and I would not be surprised to hear that there are a few rooms listed there.
Currently on HA/VRBO the owner assumes the charge back risk. I have never experienced it but I do take steps to minimize the probability.
I have had a couple of chargebacks on VRBO. Usually from people who want to cancel at the last minute and don’t like the cancellation terms. It’s probably happened 3 or 4 times.
Roomorama has given me three bookings overall, Wimdu one, Flipkey and booking.com quite a few - Maybe 10 / 15 each per year.
Jyst be advised that you do not want to cancel a booking on Booking.com. They will charge you to rehouse the guest and if that is in the middle of August it might be expensive!
I mentioned charge backs due to pay per booking listings where they pay out after guest has not complained within 24 hrs of arrival. Any ideas if they run it the same way as when you take guest payment on subscription?
FK has told me they offer no protection (which I think may even be illegal) and Air has told me once payment is sent to me that charge back is between them and the guest. That makes much more sense.
Then again these listing sites do all kinds of illegal things until there is a class action lawsuit.
I assure you that whenever you use HA’s CC payment system, a charge back, and any associated fees, is your problem and in most cases it is almost impossible to reverse.
I think this will cause all their customers to thunder toward AirBnB. Pretty dumb and greedy move if you ask me. This is like what Netflix did to their customers a while back… Raise the rates exorbitantly on their established customer base and the resultant PR fallout made national headlines.
