Booking.com payment problems

I have two properties listed at BDC. Property A was verified right away. Property B is still in the probationary stage. (It is a mystery why A was verified so quickly and B was not -- no one at BDC seems to be able to answer that.)

What this means is that for verified Property A, BDC collects the payment and then sends the payout to me the morning after the arrival, ala AirBnB. This seems to work fine. 

For Property B, BDC does NOT collect the payment -- because I am not yet verified. Yet, because I am not yet verified, BDC will not share the credit card info with me for bookings related to this property. Their advice is to collect the payment directly from the guest upon arrival. 

So now I must send payment requests from OR directly to my Property B guests, but not my Property A guests.

I would love for this to be automatic, but the issue is that the OR settings apply to the entire BDC channel -- not to my individual properties. For example, my OR Credit Card Payment Mode is set to "Automatic" which works for Property A, but it really should be set to "Manual" for Property B. 

So my feature request is to make channel settings assignable to each individual property on Booking.com rather than to the channel itself. 

Any advice on how to deal with this moving forward? I suppose the only thing I can do is set up an invoice trigger for Property B bookings until I am verified for Property B?

As an aside for anyone contemplating ramping up on BDC... I am getting exhausted by this platform's problems far outweighing the return. Their verification process is mysterious and undefined; their tax rates have been incorrect and difficult to change since day one; the interface is not intuitive and downright misleading; the guests seem to cancel at a much higher rate than other platforms... I may not be long for this platform. 

Dori, 

Several years ago we tried bookings. Has the EXACT same experience with them, so after 4 years NOTHING has changed, so history tells me its not going to change. LOTS of cancelations, poor guest quality, payment issues, all the same as you are describing. My advice, cut your loses, save your valuable time for a platform that really cares, they DONT! Good luck! 

Not worth the time and energy on owers/mamangers end.

Dori,

For this particular case, you could leave the card mode as automatic and let the missing card emails go out for property B. Or, you could leave the card mode automatic, but turn off the missing card error and provide your own friendly emails via trigger for property B.

There is actually a third scenario here: I'm not verified either (longer discussion, condo..no mailbox...working on it), and yet BDC DOES send the credit card info to OR. could be because the first thing I did when I set up the integration was (based on OR documentation) ask them to turn on the BDC feature that sends OR the CVV which they did. Pure speculation on my part, maybe enabling the flag to send CVV enabled the full feature of sending the credit card to OR. Coming back to my case, OR does have the guest credit card on file, so what I need to do is manually go to "Transactions" and "Collect Payment (Run Card)". 

The feature that I would like, is a way in OR to automatically schedule the "collect payment" without me having to go, manually, to each booking and add the schedule payment part by hand. maybe add a third option in BDC channel Payments section

That being said, I had no clue this was my case. The first BDC stay for me was in Dec 22 (last month as of this writing). since then, i had 3 more, and yet no payment in my bank. It took me a couple of hours of back-and-forth with BDC customer support over their messaging system to figure out what is going on. CS was nice but wasn't super helpful/knowledgeable, they keep saying that they don't process payments in my case, which did started me thinking _I_ need to process those payments which i did. One CC got denied, email the guest...we'll see.

I was totally confused about this specific scenario, I didn't fully understand what was happening, and OR doc (maybe i missed something) totally missed this case. I really wish OR booking.com FAQ page would have a section on this case