All Forum Posts by: Julie Chai

I'm glad I saw this post. I just saw their ad (Booking.com) and wondered what they'd be like. LOL.  I have no experience with them and now I'm glad I don't. I just wanted to add or suggest not to book one nighters, and don't instant book. Isn't that usually the bottom of the barrel clientele?

Hey Julie!

I have one of my STRs listed on Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com, and have a direct booking site for it. I honestly think it was just a bad coincidence that your first guest on booking.com was a bad one. I have been listed on there for about 8 months now and have had no issues really. 

For pros/cons of booking.com I would say the following...

Pros:
-if you use guesty you can sync your airbnb info into your booking.com listing info to ease the set up process
-there are more options to check off in the amenities portion of the listing set up, so you can really display the uniqueness of your property
-I would wager 90% of self-managing str hosts only list on up to VRBO/Airbnb, which means there are not nearly as many options for people to choose between, which means more exposure for your listing
-rumor has it that booking.com just invested a large sum of money into building out their services to provide more vacation home listings rather than hotels.
-Booking.com is a very large and established company that has been around much longer than airbnb and vrbo

Cons:
-more listings to make sure are all staying maintained assuming you are also on airbnb and vrbo
-you have to pay them their commission back at the end of each month which is a pain in the a** and is an unnecessary extra step
-payouts can take longer as you mentioned
-it has been impossible for me to find anyway to contact customer service over the phone and instead you have to refer to their forums and FAQs for any answers you need.

Hope you found this helpful. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, happy to help!

-Ben Scarborough

This was several years ago now. TThey would only give me back the commission they charged. Here's the red flags that we had missed when we were still fairly green: 

1) Credit card declined so they gave us a different card from their "sister"
2) Booked last minute
3) Locals
4) We had even asked for an ID so they sent a fake passport but the name was spelled slightly off
They had parties at the property and destroyed some things. Then when the real owner of the credit card number found the charge, they did a charge back. We had some decent guests too but not enough to risk it.  

Hospitable saves me $25 a month in time, so it essentially pays for itself. Same for Pricelabs. These are the only two things I pay for. I self manage, work a full-time w2, and only have one property.

I believe Booking.com messaging works in Hospitable for me, yes. The actual Booking.com site is crap and I have had issues with it, but the integration with Hospitable has not caused me any issue yet. 

 Just take a ton of pictures and accurately file the claim with quotes and invoices. I did an AirCoverage claim and got it all covered. Was $4K in damages. 

It SUCKED but it was fine.

 Were you able to get the booking.com messaging working on Hospitable?  I went through the setup process meticulously like 5 times, and it says everything is fine, support thinks everything is fine, but I don't get any booking.com messages in Hospitable, nor do the automated messages get sent out.

It seems like quite the hack/workaround they have set up with booking.com so I'm wondering if it really works reliably at all.

Terrible! We had two fraudulent bookings back to back and got no support. We stopped using them 

I'm sorry to read this. Wishing you well in this endeavor!

Yes.

VRBO has its own Expanded Distribution Network which includes Expedia Distribution brands, such as:

• Travelocity
• CheapTickets
• Orbitz
• Expedia
• Trivago
• KAYAK
• Other affiliates that specialize in vacation rentals.

I get < 10% of bookings from VRBO in my markets so this is my experience.