Hi all Gite and B&B owners, I have been using Airbnb recently since I stopped updating and working on my own site. My business is very limited due to not being in a particularly well known tourist area (two weeks of Marciac jazz is about it) and I found the amount of work I had to put in to keep my site up to date for the searches was too much for the few weeks business that came my way. My main business is teaching english and offering home stay's anyway. However Airbnb have been brilliant at bringing me clients and they do all the financial side for you as regards taking the money up front and paying you (eventually as it is not yet in my account) after the guests arrival. But one of my guests asked why I don't use booking.com Good question! They do charge 15% on any booking however but don't pass extra charges onto the client. (which Airbnb do) My question is, do any of you out there use them? Do you find the charges reasonable in relation to their advertising and do you get many clients through them?
Sorry this has taken so long to get back to replying to this - we've been a bit overwhelmed!
Booking.com's a very sophisticated machine and has certainly brought extra bookings, amounting for example to about 20% of our July nights this year. Earlier in the year it brought us a clientèle we've never had before – guys working in the area needing 4 nights accommodation at a stretch, which is great if you don't mind getting up for an early breakfast.
Their support is good, they won't let you go 'live' until you've done the Extra-net training with one of their staff (by phone) and there's almost always someone on the end of a telephone if you have a problem. If you want to speak to them in your native language, you can. I've learnt the hard way that you need to set it up in a way that suits you! I had a big surprise earlier in the season when I discovered that the system defaulted to giving you a same day arrival, so had to reset that to at least 24 hours. Over July and August we've set our system with them to a 2 night minimum stay as otherwise it wasn't worth the effort, once we'd paid 15% commission.
Our biggest problem when we first started taking booking.com bookings was 'no shows'. Their system is set up to take credit card numbers so you have protection if someone fails to give you whatever notice you require for a cancellation. We can't accept credit card payments so this quickly became a problem for both last minute bookers or people who ignored my request for a cheque. Once again, booking.com's back-up is great and so long as you copy them into a deadline for paying a deposit, they are more than happy to cancel a booking for you for non-payers. For really last minute bookings I've used PayPlug, enabling people to pay their deposit with a bank card: it's marginally cheaper than PayPal and a more user friendly interface, in my opinion.
Synchronising booking systems can be a problem when people can book your accommodation on line without your intervention. For this reason we use a channel manager; we started with Freetobook before we signed up with booking.com, but felt that their channel management system was rather more than we wanted to pay at £1 a booking. Instead we changed to beds24, who charge a very reasonable monthly flat fee, and that has synchronised our own website calendar with booking.com's. Of course we can add telephone bookings manually.
Once you get your head around making it work for you, booking.com's worth thinking about.
Jan
We use it for our B&B - started last August so have nearly done a full year. Am drowning in rooms to prepare for later so will reply about our experience when I'm at least a good way towards being ready for tonight's new arrivals.
Jan
We did wonder about using it for the B&B too but I`m not sure I could keep on top of the availability demands . A lot of our B&B bookings(esp this year) come at the last minute & I find the sites I use already bring me pretty good business. The gite is more difficult to rent out of season & that is why we decided to try booking.com. Hope all this helps :)
That sounds brilliant. I may well switch from Airbnb to Booking.com completely. It appears to give you more control. Thank you Christine :)
I use my usual contract, where I ask for a deposit & then balance 4 weeks before arrival & take the payments myself. They do insist that you give them your bank details & then they take the commission direct from your account but they give you plenty of warning...& don`t take the commission until after the stay. As I said before...so far so good & they are very helpful if you have any queries.
Hi Christine, that's useful information and a sensible idea to block out those weeks you are likely to fill elsewhere by 'cheaper' means. Do you take payments direct or do booking.com organise that as per Airbnb? I notice that they ask you to give them the right to take payments directly from your account - is that how it works for you?
Hi Catherine. We started using booking.com this year for the gite to see if we could generate some bookings out of the main summer season. It did work for us in April & May & although I think the commission charges are high, as my kids say its better to have some revenue for the gite rather than it standing empty. I blocked out the summer months as I can get clients in the gite then usually anyway & I am waiting now to see what happens in the autumn. We too are not in a very "touristy" area & I think it will work for us. The organisation is good but you must keep your availability chart up to date especially if you have clients booking from other sites. So far so good as far as I`m concerned.