Have you had a booking from booking.com?

I am looking to speak with somebody with an actual reservation for a property through booking.com

Does the API integration update descriptions and pictures?
Am I correct to understand I need to manually create the property in booking.com, then connect it? (Not a problem, just looking to understand).

Almost all of the set-up is manual on Booking Dot Com's admin page, and it's an absolute PITA (the interface is TERRIBLE). That, plus the low quality of guest BDC attracts and the non-productivity of that channel in general, is why I've only bothered to set up two of my 11 properties with BDC.

I've hosted I think four guests from BDC. One of them left my property a filthy mess, and the other actually damaged things (nothing major, fortunately, but still). I was not able to collect from either guest (my listings were defaulting to "Payments By Booking," and I hadn't yet learned to collect CC info directly from BDC guests). I've since adjusted my BDC markup to 30% (to pay the 15% BDC commission plus an extra 15% "pain and suffering" fee for putting up with BDC). Ever since then, I've gotten exactly one booking that booked and then canceled a few days later (for travel next year).

I wouldn't bother.

Is there anyone using ownerrez and booking.com who'd be willing to share recent experience with booking.com?

Between the ownerrez forums and reddit, my impression is that the quality of guests is lower and the booking.com host interface is hard to use, though most of the comments on the ownerrez forums are a year or more old. I'm wondering how much of the issues with property setup and payments is at least partially solved by ownerrez? And more importantly, is anyone in the US getting a meaningful number of bookings from booking.com?

I'm wondering how much of the issues with property setup and payments is at least partially solved by ownerrez?

That's an excellent question.  The answer right now is - basically none.  But, a vastly improved Booking.com API connection is actively in work by OwnerRez engineers, so hopefully later this quarter or perhaps early 2Q, most if not all of the property setup and payment issues will have been resolved.

We get a fair number of bookings through BDC. However, we have found that many of their guests are shopping around even at the point they book your home and we get far more cancellations from their guests than the other OTAs.

To solve for this we have limited the number of days out anyone can book on BDC to fit within our cancellation policy and that has helped a lot - we use them to fill empty nights. An extreme example of the problem was when a single guest booked two of our listings, across town from each other, for the same nights!  As soon as we saw that we called BDC and had them cancel both reservations - I would say that the BDC customer service is far better than the CSRs on any of the other platforms.

At 15% minimum, the BDC commissions are much higher than the others so we adjust the rates up to cover some of it and we do not buy into any of their Genius or Partner programs that are going to give extra unnecessary discounts. We do use "promotional discounts" that they offer IF they promote our listing AND the discounts auto expire so we don't have to remember. 

Use the Payments by Booking so you don't have to chase payments - they will pay you the gross and you remit the commissions when invoiced at the beginning of the month.

The last thing to know is that you should not use anything other than the standard rate - not discounts for non-refundable etc, as the details attached to your stay do not flow from parent to child. For example, if you have minimum night stays set those will push into your standard rate profile but will not push to other rate profiles. You can do them manually but that's a giant pain.

Hope that helps.

Stacia & Larry -  Thanks, this is very helpful and thanks for taking the time to respond.  Would you be open to two follow-up questions? 1. Are you comfortable sharing where your vacation rental is located and any observations about the type of people booking through BDC?  I know Booking.com has a larger market share in Europe so I'm wondering if you are getting Europeans through booking.com who might not look at Airbnb or VRBO, or are you getting US based people who are shopping for the same property on multiple platforms?  2.Can you clarify your comment about cancellations?  This article seems to imply that you can set up any cancellation policy you want as a host on booking.com: https://partner.booking.com/en-us/solutions/cancellation-deposit-and-prepayment-policies Could you just set your cancellation policy on booking.com to match whatever you use on Airbnb and would that solve the cancellation problem? 

Sure! We operate in the Smoky Mountains. BDC has a very large reach so we get guests funneling in via BDC even if they didn't specifically search on BDC (Similar to VRBO and Expedia - some of your VRBO guests are finding you on Expedia or their other consumer-facing brands). 

I'd say that the majority of guests we get on Booking are good but there are bad - same as on Airbnb/VRBO.  We do not have a lot of European guests but the few that we have had have booked through a BDC-related channel.

Cancellations:  BDC guests typically don't have to make a down payment to hold a reservation so they may hold your place while continuing to shop. BDC Bookings have a way higher rate of cancellation, at no cost to the guest, than other OTAs. We have a 30-day cancellation policy so we limit our open inventory to about 45 days out so that we are not allowing their guests to hold our far-out dates without "skin in the game". This limits the number of cancellations as those guests are more serious about staying at your place than those who are just window shopping. Hope that makes sense!

I read some of your other responses and they seem like everything is working out for them.  Booking.com has been a bit of a nightmare for me ini the begninning.  Very high cancellation rates.  So i like the idea that someone commented on regarding setting the window to book not to far out.  I have not had any issues with lower class guests. I mean that can happen on any platform. 

My biggest issues are HIGH cancellations and people block your calendar.  I dont have many European travellers althought I know its a big site in Europe. I have been forced to use booking.com since for whatever reason I get way more traffic from that platform for my place in Puerto Rico than on the other sites.  I have otherr places in Pocono Mountains and I refuse to advertise on booking.com because Airbnb and Vrbo and direct bookings are sufficient. 

But Booking.com does have a huge following and i get allot of bookings for the Puerto Rico property but ALLOT of cancellations.    The other main issue is booking.com does NOT facilaite payment on my behalf. Meaning they dont process payments for me.  I got the run around at first indicating I had to be on their platform for a year before they would process payments on my behalf and then I was told that they dont do that for properties in Puerto Rico, etc... always som BS.  So having to chase people down for payment and credit card infomraton combined with the fact taht many people on booking.com are window shopping makes it very difficult to deal with.    My advice is if you get enough volume from other platforms then stay AWAY from bookng.com.  I am stuck with them for now for my place oin PR but that because its a semi new listing. Once I get enough volume from other platforms im done with booking.com and will keep them to fill gaps. But definitly not rely on them (which I unfortunately do now)