Veteran AirBnB/VRBO Host - First time experience with Booking.com

[Luke Carl]

So. My February is very light. I spend hours on my 6 listings every day. I'm pulling my hair out. My prices are lower than I want and still, the bookings just aren't coming in. 

I decided to try Booking.com and wanted to share my experience with the forum. 

It was a complete waste of time and here's why. They send snail mail to the property with a code to verify the properties existence. My property is in a Vacation Rental Only area and doesn't even have a mail box. I called customer service. They said they might be able to send someone to the property and verify its existence and paperwork to verify that I own it. 

I checked the site. There are Zero single family homes in my market. Only hotels. In my case we're dealing with Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg log cabins. There's somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 of these cabins in existence and there are zero on Booking.com. I wish I would have done this step first, maybe I would have realized it was a waste of time. 

I'm sure this is market specific and you may have different results but instead of it being a complete waste of my morning I thought I'd share this info with the forum in order to hopefully save someone else's time. 

If for some reason I'm the first person that has tried to put a cabin on Booking.com and they call me back and verify that it's going to happen I will post an update. I'm not holding my breath.