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. 

[Luke Carl]

I also want to mention I've tried to reset my tripadvisor password 3 times and it doesn't work so they're pretty much worthless also. 

Love to hear other folks positive experiences with platforms other than Airbnb/VRBO but with 6 properties and a day job its not looking like they're worth my time. 

[John Underwood]

@Luke Carl Thanks for posting this information.

I think I had to do a similar verification when I started with Homeaway.

As you know I get most of my bookings through HA and VRBO. I also use Airbnb and I get a small trickle of reservations from them. They email me occasionally and ask if I want to offer a discount for a week they see as not booked at say a 26% discount. Then they show this discount online but they say they also send targeted emails to certain customers with this discounted price. I have been bumping up the price for that time frame and then accept the suggested discount. It sometimes works and I get a Airbnb booking within days of this. Sometimes it doesn't work but worth a try.

Have you noticed that Homeaway has a show on A&E Saturdays at 11AM? It is called Vacation Rental Potential. I set my DVR to record it. It is interesting and they are in a different part of the country each week.

Homeaway also has some cool new tools. They identify your competition set and you can tweak these. It shows when you loose a booking to someone else on Homeaway/VRBO and you can go check out their property to see what their pictures, amenities and pricing looks like. If you win a booking it tells you what other properties they looked at before choosing you. Sometimes it is properties in other states. I received a booking for this summer from someone from Rhode Island and I saw that my competition was located on other lakes in other states. It also charts prices from your competition, it shows what percentage of your competition is booked, it also shows the average price for booked properties vs unbooked properties. One very powerful tool is it shows how many inquires there are for certain dates so you can anticipate a high demand time frame. I love these new tools and look at them several times a week as they are always being updated.

[Paul Sandhu]

I have had 2 listings on Booking.com for the last 3 months.  Yesterday was the first response from a prospective tenant.  They said they made a reservation on the website before they called me.  I received no notification from Booking.com.

The website is not user friendly and somewhat complicated.  On a scale of 1-10 I would give it a 2 or 3.  As a comparison, CraigsList gets an 8 or 9 from me.  The website creators should be treated like Mussolini at the end of WW2.

[Andrew Wong]

I integrated with booking.com by way of using guesty.com. No problems so far, although it looks as if the user experience on the booking end is misleading about cleaning fees and what not.

I have 7 properties.

[Julie McCoy]

@Luke Carl Yep, Booking.com has been a waste of time for me.  I haven't tried it with my cabin, but I did list my CA house for a brief period.  Can't remember what I did re: proving ownership, might've sent them a scan of my deed.  Onboarding was incredibly onerous and confusing (they'll schedule a phone call with you so they can have someone walk you through it), and once you get a reservation, communication with guests is difficult and they do not process payment for you.  I had three bookings; one went through with some effort, two cancelled when I tried to secure payment.  After that I got rid of them because it was waaaay too much effort.

I like the idea of reaching a more international audience that they apparently reach, but they need to get out of the stone age before I'll be willing to try them again.  I'm not interested in paying a third party just to integrate with them.  

[Ethan Cooke]

@John Underwood - Thanks for sharing the info about Home Away’s Vacation Rental Potential show & their new online tools to gauge your VR market.  

All - Have you used AirDNA.co? (Not .com). They aggregate all the data from Airbnb and you can buy market data by town, neighborhood, ZIP Code etc.  (Roughly $30 a month and well worth it to pay for the month and then drop the subscription if no longer needed and check out another market.) They have detailed information by area about  average booking price by listing size; occupancy, market demand and they even highlight the most successful listings in each neighborhood. Terrific tool to optimize your listings and to identify hot new VR markets.

[Luke Carl]

@Ethan Cooke most of us hosts on this forum agree that airdna is a waste of time and we prefer to do our own annayslis. 

[Paul Sandhu]

@Ethan Cooke  My experience with Airdna is that it is spot on correct.  But then I dug into their methodology.  They were using my STRs and nobody elses to calculate and provide the information.  So if I wanted Airdna information about my town, I would just look at my own numbers because that is what Airdna provides.

In other words, their data is flawed.

[Michael McKay]

Our properties are in an urban area and we do about 25% of our business on booking.com. The back end isn't great, but the key is to become a partner which unlocks a lot of great features as well as a personal representative with a direct phone number.

You also need a good PMS that auto-charges credit cards and integrates with the booking.com API.

[Villy Ellinger]

Booking.com charges up to 15% of booking fees to the guest. A couple of years ago I tried it on one of my properties and had a friend try to "ghost" book a week just to check on the customer-side experience. What my friend was quoted on the guest-end was way higher than my rental prices. The problem is that Booking.com (just like Tripadvisor.com) wraps the whole quote into one. So the guest thinks the property is overpriced and nobody books. After I cancelled the Booking.com account/listing they kept soliciting me. I use them for hotel travel, but don't think they are very good for vacation rentals or short term rentals. 

[Luke Carl]

@Villy Ellinger  Thank you for that. I have been getting a ton of phone calls and emails from an actual person at booking.com with their direct line. She's got me interested. But every time I go to add more info about one of my properties or add pictures etc... The process just annoys me big time. I copy of the deed? You've got to be kidding me. Your post has encouraged me to give up on them. Again. 

I actually emailed the link to this thread to the sales rep that is keeping in touch with me. Hopefully she'll read this today and maybe they'll make a few changes that make things more owner friendly. But I doubt it. 

[Villy Ellinger]

@Luke Carl I'm glad you find value in my comment, although I really wish that Booking.com would be a viable source of reservations. My experience with TripAdvisor has not been very positive either. One of my properties is still listed there because I have several pending reservations. As soon as those are done I plan to no longer list on TripAdvisor as well. Their booking fees to the guests are very high and they are so concerned about owners asking travelers to book "directly" that they make communicating with guests nearly impossible. For example, apparently we don't get to learn the phone number or the last name of the guest until they have paid in full. I'm always looking for recommendations about where other owners have been successful listing, so if you have any I would appreciate the information. Also, if you know anything about Tripping.com, please do tell. I have never used them, but would love to know.

[Luke Carl]

I just saw a commercial on TV (while on vacation because I wouldn’t watch tv in real life) for Booking.com

They advertised my market. In fact it was the highlight of the commercial. Rent this cabin in the mountains.... two plugs for the smokys. Including Gatlinburg Pigeon Forge and North Carolina.

The last time I was dealing with them I sent them the link to this thread and they finally left me alone.

Is this forum still in agreement that Booking.com is not worth it?

[Paul Sandhu]

For its face value, Booking.com is not worth it. 

However, 2 Thursdays ago I had a person reserve a unit from me from Booking.com starting Sunday.  We texted a few times and I found out he is coming here for an emergency repair job on the heat exchangers of the cat unit at a local refinery.  I told him I had other places available.  Ended up renting 4 more places to 10 guys he works with.  

Those 4 places would not have been rented if it were not for Booking.com.  They were all first time renters, but it was not the first time they had worked in my town. They said they'd rent from me again before staying in a motel in this town.

[Yuliya Boika]

What does it take to become a partner?

Nightmarish experience with them so far..

Instead of cancelling a guest's reservation I need to relocate them at my expense

My listing is 4 bedroom 3 bathroom single family and its currently near impossible to find in  my area.

Anyone had similar experience?

Will closing the default bank account they have on file prevent them from charging me for that?