Logged into my account today to check my inquires and contact potential guest on VRBO and all the contact information is now gone on all my listing. Called to VRBO to get a refund for what I paid for my 10 listing (~$6,000) and they simply don’t care and said no refunds will be given.
Is anyone one else out there upset that now paid subscriptions no longer have access to email or phone number information? Or the fact that you are now forced to use their online payments so they can charge your guest a 10-15% fee? In my case they will now be making about $100k/yr of me in service fees due to the number of properties I have.
Who out there finds this sick and want to do something about it?
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I am on homeaway.
I have paid until september and no booking so far. I am not able to synch my prices with my channel manager (don’t have 5 properties) so I will stop to use them in september
That’s to bad. These sites where actually pretty good until they sold the company and now they have become greedy with these services fees. My subscription doesn’t end until 2018 so they basically stole my money.
I heard about this! They even block them after the guest has booked! Crazy.
File a chargeback on the 6,000!!!
How has it been easy for an Airbnb guest to find your properties on VRBO to avoid service fees? This is not something an Airbnb guest is going to do unless they have been around for years and believe you don’t have online booking enrolled with HA.
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What is stopping you from doing a chargeback if you are not enrolled with HA payments? HA was greedy waaayyy before Expedia recently purchased them. The only reason Expedia purchased them is because the company set everything in place to have the service fees. You should go to your bank and file a chargeback on each of your ten properties. You seem very nonchalant about all of this.
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It’s actually fairly easy to reroute people to avoid fees but that’s not the reason we reroute them in the first place. We route them so we can process their payment versus a third party site. Third parties present all kinds of problems and we prefer working directly with our guest.
If your interested in the process it’s relatively easy. First start by making all your listing across all site have the same title. Once that is done just tell the guest to search for the title and direct them to the site you want them to use. Most site prevent you from typing another sites full name but nothing prevent you from telling them click on the one that starts with a H or a V.
Most people do this already with out you asking them as people like to find the best price. You just need to give them some extra incentive. For example my prices on sites that require me to use their payment processing, like airbnb, have a 20%-40% price increase. People quickly realize this but if they haven’t and they are haggling you on price that’s when you tell them to search for the title and find the better price. You can also tell them to search for a property id as that will also come up on googles search engine.
All that being said there are people that pay that extra 40% and at that point I’m more than happy to take the reservation. To give you an idea on how well this works. We process payments for about 90% of our rentals and the rest is typically 3rd party processing with people paying big premiums.
Further more we have been in business since 2011 and receive several hundred reservations each year.
Cabinhost - In regards to the Chargeback. It did cross my mind but what happens in that case is if you loss you run the risk of the listing being shut down and losing the money. Although I can’t access guest information anymore nothing is stopping me from redirecting the traffic to another site that supports the subscription based model or free communications with guest.
If anyone else is having the same problem I suggest you do the same.
I’ve totally had guests just Google my property name and book it on HomeAway rather than Airbnb. It ain’t hard. At this point I have more booked nights per year from HA/VRBO but I realize that could change, although this is my best year so far.
Catskillsgrrl - Have you found a new site to reroute people to which let’s you communicate directly with them?
I don’t do that, but once they stay with me they are welcome to contact me directly via email of phone or my rental website.
