Industry Conversations

So now that Hostpitable supports booking.com I am finally ready to put my listing on it. I thought it would be easier to set up and get paid than when I looked at the booking site previously. I am so lost with setting up the details on booking.com. I have called booking a couple times and they keep saying they will have to call me back and never do. Can anyone answer these questions for me?will they collect payment and remit?will they remit the VAT or I have to remit after they collect?what is their commission fee?how does their cancellation policy work?what about any guest damages?I don’t want to make the listing live until I completely understand how their system works  Help anyone with booking.com experience?Thank you in advance  

I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence but ever since Airbnb enacted their policy on fees, my net new bookings have gone to zero.  I’ve not even received an inquiry.  I’ve lowered my pricing. I’ve looked in all of the insights and changes that I can make. This weekend I will be making adjustments to my listing photos to be more complementary to the winter season. I’m curious if there’s anyone else  experiencing this since the change with Airbnb.  Searched on my property and it still comes up as one of the top as a guest favorite. This is my only second year going into the season and it was quiet last year, but I was still getting bookings for holidays and weekends.Thanks for any insight anyone can provide I’m just wondering if Airbnb is somewhat influencing this in the background.  But then again I’m also not seeing any VRBO bookings eitherThanks in advance for any feedback you can provide if you’re in a similar situation.  

Hi. I am very new to Booking.com and I find the platform to just be very confusing. I had one booking through Booking.com and they already stayed at my rental. I cannot figure out if they paid or not. The reservation just says “no payment on file”. I am set up with Booking.com payments but I’m not sure it was set up at the time of booking. I also tried to call customer service and I just get a message that says “down for maintenance”. I’m not sure what I do from here. 

Hey there,Would you be interested in joining a video call to chat about best practices for optimizing listings and revenue?I recently joined this community and thought it would be valuable to trade notes with others on the strategies you use to maximize revenue. I’m an owner (not a property manager, and not selling anything). My STRs are in the Outer Banks, NC, with one in Denver. I tend to outperform my competitors and use some creative approaches to boost revenue and ranking, but I always pick up new ideas from others.If you also feel like you’ve found effective strategies—and are open to learning and sharing “secrets”—I’d love to connect.Reply if you’re interested! I’m hoping to keep it to a small group (5–6 people max).All the best,Scott

I’m trying to add a action button on my fb page and thought it would be good if this was integrated.

Hello to anyone using VRBO!This is my first booking for VRBO and I need to manually invoice the owner for my 25% Co-Host commission rate. I do not need to do this for AirBnB, because I am already set-up as a Co-Host on that platform to received my 25% commission rate plus the cleaning fee.Is anyone able to help me mirror AirBnB’s fee split for VRBO, so I can explain to the owner how I got to the 25% commission for this VRBO booking? I know AirBnB deducts the Host Service Fee (3%) and the Cleaning Fee, prior to the split and they do this off of the Host’s Payout (not what the Guest paid), and AirBnB does leave in the pet fee, for the Owner and Co-Host to split, but luckily no pet fee here.I guess my last questions other than calculating the 25% Co-Host percentage + Cleaning Fee, is if there is any way for this invoice split to happen automatically? 

I manage $1.3 million in bookings  and 2200 reservations a year and I’m on many platforms. Booking.com is by far the absolute worst. I do everything you’re supposed to do, we require a deposit, we require ID verification all that kind of stuff through charge automation but somehow we still just get absolute nightmare guests. Anytime I have to interact with Booking.com‘s customer support. It is a joke. Case in point, a guest recently Booked for six people at my house, paid the damage deposit, gave the names and ages of the guests, and then 30 people showed up at my house. When I contacted Booking.com about this, they said that they cannot cancel this guests reservation without their consent, which is just incredible. Does anyone have any contact with people that actually work in Booking.com like some kind of higher level rep or someone in the PR team or something? I just don’t understand how their service offerings can be so bad.

What cancellation policy does everyone use on Airbnb? Just curious since they have recently made some changes to their policies 

Has anyone tried offering this option?  10% seems high, but there might be a tweak to raise your price some to offset a portion?  Any thoughts or experience with this?  Copy n paste from Airbnb:  How a non-refundable option works You set your discount, which is typically 10% off the base price in everywhere but China Your discounted rate appears in search At checkout, guests either select your standard rate—subject to your cancellation policy—or the discounted, non-refundable rate If they cancel, you keep your entire payout for all nights booked, minus the cleaning fee if they cancel before check-in A reservation would be eligible if the check-out date is within 60 days The discount is applicable if the reservation is not booked with a pre-approval or special offer

hey Folks, I’ve been hosting for over a decade now — 8 active properties, 1,400+ reviews, Superhost for years. I got my first AirBNB-dedicated house in 2019 while working full time at Google, got a few more, and after getting laid off in 2023 I started growing. As an early user I’ve clearly seen a lot of change since airbnb was for friends crashing on mattresses at SXSW… and it’s mostly been good. But now something wild is happening. I started on low budget and even so my places performed well. Always hovered around 80%+ occupancy with nice but nothing special houses. I was doing well - FMV for my units would be about $1200/mo, but I was making avg $3k/mo on AirbNB. Totally worth it.Now it feels like guest demands and expectations have shot through the roof, but rates are staying the same or dropping, and fees are getting hire so payouts are reduced. And even though my rates are roughly the same (or even a bit lower) than they were a few years ago, occupancy is down. Meanwhile, new lis

I fired my property manager and found out that her listing of my property was suspended by Airbnb. I found out after listing the property myself after the change and received a message from Airbnb informing me they were taking down my listing saying I was circumventing their suspension. I contacted Airbnb for an appeal letting them know that I didn’t know the listing was suspended because she never told me. The customer service team didn’t really understand and would not escalate to a manager. Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

There have been so many changes rolling out to the Airbnb platform with this latest batch of updates that I figured one centralized location for all of the updates would be a good idea. 💡

We’ve gotten dinged lately on our air conditioning limits.  We allow guests to adjust the thermostat within the range 72°-80°.  Most of the time, since we’re in MS, it’s in cooling mode.  Some guests, if allowed, would and have set the thermostat down into the 60s, and neither of the two units would ever cool to those temperatures.  So, we include the following everywhere we can in the listing:Because the air conditioning units are residential and not commercial, we protect them by limiting the minimum cooling temperature.  Past guests have set the temperature far below generally accepted norms, well below 70º.  The units would never achieve those temperatures in the Mississippi heat and they've frozen up, resulting in no further air conditioning for days and costly repairs.  Thanks for understanding.  If you prefer inside temperatures lower than this, please do not book with us. What else can we do to protect our A/C units?  They’ve frozen up before, which renders them inoperable for

Hello,I am relatively new to Hospitable and am excited to see that there is a guest verification feature.  It seems like a great option for cases where Airbnb or VRBO guests come through unverified, or for Booking.com guests.  However, I am wondering how it actually works in practice.  Let’s say the verification identifies a risky guest and I want to cancel.  Wouldn’t I be penalized for initiating the cancellation?  I know there are ¨waivers¨ for host initiated cancellation, but in my experince the OTAs really really don’t want you to cancel as a host.  Has anyone had success not being penalized for a cancellation that resulted from a guest verification that came back risky? Thanks for your help, lots to learn.

Within Airbnb how many people utilize MULTIPLE discounts like Trip Length, Last Minute and/or Early Bird discounts? Tell me which ones do you have setup or use in Airbnb?  

Hello everyone, co-hosts, do you provide monthly metrics to your hosts or investors? If so, what details do you share and in what format? I’m considering building a monthly deck to share, and I’d like to include:Revenue comparison: actual monthly revenue vs. prior to us co-hosting Cost savings: money saved through troubleshooting and minor repairs (e.g., recessed lights, hot water release valve replacement, toilet fill valve replacement, etc.) ROI clarity: ensuring hosts clearly see the return on their investmentI want to make sure investors/hosts understand not only what they’re earning, but also how we’re saving them time and money.  How do you all structure and present this type of information?

With Airbnb switching soon to fake phone numbers for guests and us how can we capture phones and emails so we can continue to communicate with our guests going forward? 

I wanted to throw out a Town Hall guest idea — Justin from HiChee.com It’s a free tool that shows guests where they can book the same property cheaper, which ostensibly would be your direct site! (Airbnb, VRBO, or DIRECT), So it helps hosts push more direct bookings which I think totally lines up with what Hospitable ultimately wants for its subscribers.. We need to get hosts to suggest it to their guests because once people know about this they will use it to book direct, whether it's with us or another host. It will benefit us in direct bookings! I'm really passionate about this because I am so sick of Airbnb! Would love to see him on a future Town Hall! But any hosts seeing this check out his website. Hichee.com . I'm not a paid promoter. I just want more direct booking LOL — Kim

The co-host vernacular seems to have sprung up relatively quickly and seems to mean something not far from traditional STR property management, but with a bit more versatility. For those in the Hospitable community who have co-hosted,:What’re you seeing in the space?    What works well? What has been challenging?   If you were starting over right now what would you do differently?

Switched from Evolve to managing our own listings recently.  just found out that VRBO rejected most, but not all, of the pix we uploaded.  These were the exact same professionally taken pix that Evolve used.  We bought the pic files from Evolve and I uploaded the same original files they used, which VRBO had no problem with.  Now they are rejected on our listings, and probably the reason we have almost zero traction on VRBO so far.  I have a feeling its the fact that we still have listings with Evolve until we work thru the remaining reservations we had with them.  The listings are no longer public, but they probably exist through the Evolve/VRBO integration, even though none of our remaining bookings are with VRBO.  How do we get this fixed?  Evolve and VRBO both point fingers at each other.  I don’t want to wait another 2 months until we’ve finished all Evolve bookings to delete the account.

Do you charge a cleaning fee?Or do you increase your nightly rate to offset?  Or do you put it under management fees so it is “hidden”?  Thanks! 

Hey guys I am trying to choose from this 2 apps ! For the company that I work in TULUM MEXICO 🇲🇽 specifically for the deposit and contract any thoughts? I have a special DISCOUNT if anyone of you is planning to come ! Write  (HOST) https://tpgstay.com/en-us My name is Pam See you soon!   

Is anyone using Happy Guest? My STRs are smaller, single family properties (both 2 bedrooms). I am considering using Happy Guest so I can list on VRBO and have accidental insurance coverage as well as a rental agreement. My concern is Happy Guest requires me to purchase a policy on all guest, including my Airbnb guests. I worry about getting pushback from Airbnb guests on the two options to either 1) purchase the coverage for $37 OR 2) put a $1000 hold on their cc. $37 is a lot to add on considering what my price point is and some may not have $1000 room on a credit card.  I have reviewed two properties that use Happy guest and looked through their guest reviews and BOTH properties had an unfavorable review due to having this pop up after making their reservation. Both properties clearly state this requirement prior to booking but as we all know most guests do not read all the info prior to booking.  For those using Happy Guest, what has been your experience? 

This month marks the first time I’ve used the owner statement feature in conjunction with co-host payouts. Overall, the tracking looks good—however, the “Owner Income” field is not displaying correctly.This figure is obviously one of the most important metrics for my owners, but unfortunately, customer support hasn’t been able to provide a solution.For context: The Airbnb payout is remitted directly to us (the co-host). The VRBO payout is sent directly to the owner. Owner payouts are being held by the owner, yet the system does not reflect this under “Owner Income.” Is anyone else experiencing this issue, or found a workaround? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

We’re getting 85-90% occupancy on AirBnB. But VRBO has absolutely ZERO bookings. Listings are as identical as can be, dnyamic pricing is synced. Is anyone else facing the same issue?