All Forum Posts by: Doug Fluckiger

My wife and I own a couple of STRs and would like to get into the fix & flip game, but we need to start small. We're looking for a house ≤ $100k with an ARV of ≥$160k, off-market, mostly cosmetic rehab, B or better neighborhood. Can be older, # of BRs & BAs doesn't matter to us. We've been looking in the Midwest but are open to anywhere. Do you have suggestions for markets for this kind of deal?

Quote from @Leslie Anne Morris:

I'm in London at industry events here this week. I met the Booking.com team and they have changes coming and are particularly targeting STR hosts in the USA. They want the feedback. They'll listen! I'd watch for more detail to come from them. I gave them my feedback which is largely similar to yours, I also told them they are very expensive.

Also be aware that being a European company they appear to be unaware of potential shady behavior in the US. We've had police called to our place, spent days and hundreds of $$ in drug cleanup, had parties (orgies?) in our place where children are present, all with people with disconnected phones and apparently illegitimate credit card numbers (for one of the two I was actually able to track down)—how is it that we have none of these problems with Airbnb guests? Are they screening for that? I set up damage deposits for both properties and see no evidence that a deposit has ever been charged.

booking.com actually shut down my entire account while we were on vacation, then panicked and reset it up incorrectly, and have had trouble with my account ever since. That may account for some of their troubles in trying to help me out.

Quote from @Brooklyn McCarty:

Sorry you had a bad experience! I just don’t think they are “there” yet, quite obviously. Hoping they get it figured out quickly though 

It's fine for a company to be not "there" yet, but they shouldn't cost you money with their ineptitude. Sunk costs for April: ~$1800. Stay away.

Quote from @Nathan Gesner:

"Don't use XYZ because I don't like what they did when they did the things they did to me, and they may do things to you that you don't want them to do."

Can you be just a tad more specific? :)

Nathan, I have never made posts like this at the risk of appearing to be a whiner, but our experience has been so awful that I'd be doing a disservice to other investors if I didn't warn them, even at the risk of being misconstrued. I'm speaking up because this company will cost you money. Some of the horrors are cataloged below.

Quote from @Leslie Anne Morris:

I'm in London at industry events here this week. I met the Booking.com team and they have changes coming and are particularly targeting STR hosts in the USA. They want the feedback. They'll listen! I'd watch for more detail to come from them. I gave them my feedback which is largely similar to yours, I also told them they are very expensive.

Leslie, booking.com appears to be at the vanguard of companies that pretend to care about their revenue source but steadfastly ignore them. They say "your experience is important to us", give surveys, and put feedback notices at the bottom of their pages, but when you call them, expect to spend hours talking to 2–4 people only to discover they cannot help you. This is my experience every time I call them, and I've called a lot. The CSAs you talk to are sincerely trying to help, but most of them are paralyzed to go off script and, according to one of the two actual Americans I spoke with, most of them are very new and don't know how to help people, especially in a foreign language (English).

Quote from @Sarah Kensinger:

Yeah, I'm curious too! We know people that use them successfully, especially with boutique hotels.

Sarah, our manager said it best: "People use booking.com when they can't get approved by Airbnb." Most of our booking.com guests used drugs, contrary to rules, and many were completely calloused about messes and damage to the townhouse. Most of them appear to have false credit card numbers, and their phone numbers definitely do not work (believe me, I called them all.) Booking.com allows you to "set up" a damage deposit, but in my experience it doesn't work. No damage deposit is charged.
See below for more horrors.

Quote from @Trish Mccoy:

Wow... I just signed up with them... Haven't actually experienced a booking yet, but lots of requests.     What was your problems with them? 

Trish, it's hard to relate how many problems we've had with them without being bitter, but here's an important one:

You have to realize that booking.com is not Airbnb. They WILL NOT collect payments for you, and they WILL NOT tell you that they're not collecting payments! They expect you to do that through a mysterious service called "Payments by Booking" that they don't tell you about and you cannot set up by yourself. They collect credit card numbers but don't charge guests, so that the guests think they've paid; then they hide the CC info from you and pretend they can't access it. You MUST have a way to process CC payments on your own (I gave up on PayPal and signed up for a service called Merchant Services to do this) before yo ustart. We lost all income for one property for the entire month of April because of this. See more major problems in my responses below.

DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY for your short- or medium-term rentals (or anything else). We’re pretty patient, even-keeled people, as you can see by my steely-eyed resolve to not list my complaints here. We gave them many chances (more than we should have, because we trusted them), and their incompetence is awe-inspiring.They will lose you money—possibly a lot of money, as they did us.

You can’t report them to the BBB or to the police because they’re in The Netherlands. Neener neener!

Simply avoid this company. Use airbnb instead.

@Ke Nan Wang Good idea. Here are the rooms in the first unit:

https://airbnb.com/h/cozyyellowbedroom

https://airbnb.com/h/cozybluebedroom

https://airbnb.com/h/cozyspaciousbedroom

These are private bedrooms, each with a combination lock and its own half- or full- bath, full kitchen, washer dryer, keyless entry, etc. etc.

The second unit is not yet listed by room. Here's the whole unit listing: https://airbnb.com/h/freshlyvi...

@Kyle Butler Thank you, that's a good idea too. In fact our first listing in the 2nd unit (the dog urine situation) came from an insurance agency. I'll reach out to others as well. The problem was not the agency but the dogs—and we've now banned pets.