booking .com sucks at a god mode level, why?

Hi ​@Joseph Coker, that sounds like a really stressful situation to be in.

We’re trying to get you some help, so we’ve escalated this with Booking.com to see if more can be done on their side. They’re looking into it internally, but we can’t make any promises on if, how, or when it might be addressed.

We’re keeping our fingers crossed for you. 💜

Hi Petra, I appreciate that, any help is something. What I have found is that Booking.com’s support doesn’t really exist in their policies are worse. This is kind of a last ditch effort before I pull all of my listings off their platform. I just think they have a double whammy of Bad protections for hosts and some of the worst guest behavior I’ve ever seen. A few months ago, a lady showed up with eight dogs, we kicked her out immediately, and turns out she had locked one of the dogs in a closet without food or water with the lights off for 24 hours. If we had not come immediately to do the turnover the dog would’ve starved to death. Just absolute psycho behavior that makes Airbnb look tame by comparison And similarly, Booking.com went way out of their way to try to get me to compensate the Guest and sent me like 10 emails about it and had zero concerned about the damage done to our house and our experience, etc..

Just when I was thinking about pulling the trigger and listing on Booking 😂

Here are my gripes with booking.com

1. There is no host guarantee/air cover. If a guest burns your house down, there is nothing you can due outside of suing them and good luck there.
2. The options they give you is to have them collect a deposit on your behalf or you do it. If they collect a deposit on your behalf, and a guest burns your house down, they will then ask the guest if they burned your house down, if the guest says no, thats that and you get nothing lol. If you collect the deposit yourself, it will require you setting up a third party service. This does not integrate very well with booking.com. Their settings are bad around this. When guests see the messages about an additional deposit they take it to mean its a scam. If they dont pay the deposit, you have to monitor that to make sure you are protected. And of course, this service costs money.
3. There is no trust and safety team. Airbnb are souless ghouls but compared to booking .com they are angels. If you have an emergency sayyyyyy a guest shows up claiming they have a reservation and its a legit link of booking but its in hebrew and they try to gain access to the house even though you assure them this is incorrect and its a scam OR a guest puts zero dogs on the reservation but is an amatuer dog breeder from Atlanta and brings 8 dogs into a two bedroom house OR books for 6 people then throws a rager etc if any of this happens there is no team that handles problems specifically so you will be forced to deal with their support’s general population who you will be LUCKY to get ahold of
4. When you call, the way they verify who you are is by listing or reservation code, name, then they call you back to your number. The problem: 100% of these calls are coming internationally and your phone settings may block them no matter what you do based on your provider (I use Verizon). Imagine finally getting ahold of someone, they say they will call you back, you get no call, no email, no follow up of any kind
5. There is no circumstance in which they will kick out a guest and you get to keep the money. This sounds hyperbolic but I am not kidding. If a guest is murdering someone, and you explain this breaks both house rules (and rules in general) what they wouldn’t do is kick the guest out for breaking the rules, they would say they can’t without their consent
6. Their discount system is complicated, convoluted, and stupid
7. There is no guest review system. They can review you, you cant review them. There is no consequence for bad behavior
8. You receive all the money and have to pay them their cut which is just a needless step added

Booking.com is a system that is set up for hotels, and there is just a huge culture difference between them and us, and even though I have had some success on booking I am constantly amazed at how shitty and uncaring they are. I do not understand why they are popular

Wow. That is quite a list. I think the primary reason that they aren’t as good as Airbnb is that they are essentially a hotel provider trying to get into Short Term Rentals. They have been a very successful company: they are the largest travel company in the world by market cap, and it isn’t even close. They are more than double the market cap of Airbnb. Booking is trying to glom on the hotel playbook onto Short Term Rentals, and for obvious reasons it has its downsides. Airbnb had to learn all these things the hard way: the whole reason AirCover exists is because they had a major PR disaster after an incident. Not to mention that Airbnb is a design-forward company built by trained designers, so everything just seems more intuitive and thoughtful compared to most companies. There is the additional factor that everyone I speak to there is either in Europe or Asia. They are trying to expand in the US and in particular with STRs, but there are some cultural challenges if everyone we are working with has never lived in the US.

I totally agree. It’s clear they are large, and successful in a different world but it’s shocking how bad their general policy and support is.  It’s been 2 days since this guest tried to throw a rager and I have decided 0 response to my messages from support. If the guests do nothing bad, they are fine, but if literally anything goes wrong iyoure toast 

I have closed out Booking.com for our homes as it was just too difficult and they would randomly close one of our houses.  When I finally reached someone they never could explain why and they would set it to reopen, which in fact takes 7 days.  It was too difficult for me to babysit.

Completely agree with everything mentioned already, I HATE BOOKING.COM!!!! Virtually all of the guest we have received through them are the worst, they don’t show up, so you mark them as a now show but your date was blocked and you have already lost revenue from them not showing up. guest don’t cancel, a lot of bad credit cards, these guest are filthy and dirty and do not take care of the property.

We have been hit with fake IDs, fraud with credit cards, and Booking.com does nothing about for the host. They also list you 10’s if not hundreds of their various websites that do a bait and switch……. I have tried to look dates for our properties on these other sites on dates that I know are open in my calendar and it comes back with Not Available, but try these other properties we have…..

I am removing them shortly from our life. 

Oh and forgot to mention, navigating their website is a nightmare, it’s like they purposely designed it to be as difficult on the host as possible.

Booking.com is kind of stuck in limbo between turning over full control to the hosts and trying to offer control/protections like Airbnb.

Up until recently BDC operated like an old school direct booking. They basically connected you to the guest and then you were on your own. You collect funds, get rental agreements, interact with the guest, etc. They are completely uninvolved other than linking you and the guest, for which they charge their 15% commission.

The downside to this is just like advertising the place on Craigslist, you have no protections other than the ones you create for yourself. The other downside beyond that is that they would keep their 15% no matter what. Doesn’t matter if you evict the guest or they never complete payments. They connected you to them and for that they would keep the 15%.

Eventually they wanted to really try their hand at attracting STR hosts who by and large said they wanted the protections of Airbnb. So they started rolling out payments by booking (BDC collects and holds the money, the distributes it at check-in like Airbnb), some basic damage protection, etc.

The problem is that’s not really the priority of the site or how it works for the majority of their users (hotels etc), so there isn’t the proper dedication to it. So they offer it, but their support staff isn’t really familiar with it because it makes up an extreme minority of their listings. So you kind of get them with one foot in “you’re on your own, we’re just connecting you with a customer” and the other foot in “we’ll take care of everything like Airbnb, you just host them” and the result is a poor version of both, and support that has no idea what’s going on.

For anyone looking to start listing on booking.com, don’t. It is a nightmare. Maybe way another 2 years for them to fix it, or for hospitable to do everything on their end. Otherwise save yourself the time and stress

This is a really great breakdown! I think a lot of it is what you talked about when it comes to moving from hotels to STRs without really thinking about designing the product properly. Another part is that everyone seems to be ex-US and nothing seems setup with the US in mind. They don’t even use localized American English. When I set up a property, there is no default tax settings and the tax screen has a 0 value for “VAT.” No jurisdictions in the US use VAT, so its just really odd for them to just use the same terms they use in Europe. And I cannot edit the taxes myself: they make me contact support to do it which takes forever! VRBO, for all of their faults (which there are many), actually gets the taxes correct and is sometimes the first company to notify my of tax increases in my jurisdictions.

Unfortunately I have to AGREE.  If they were operating in a vacuum I suppose I’d just think that STRs suck and are just like that, but in reality I’ve been operating on Airbnb and VRBO for 5+ years before encountering Booking.com and end-to-end they are deplorable.  Guest quality is one of the chief reasons (out of 15 Booking.com stays we had 2 ragers (one with 200+ people in a 3 bedroom home in a quiet suburban house), 1 meth dealer, at least 1 no-show, and more shenanigans.  To their credit we did have 2 completely delightful guests, but 2/15 doesn’t inspire much confidence, and the other stays were atrocious.  Then comes the backend duties that we have to do and the stupid Extranet. 

Candidly I think VRBO is operating it as a “low anchor” so that their UX/UI looks comparatively good.  If there’s any reality to that I’m kinda impressed at their dedication.

Well said, Eli!

Agree Booking.com is horrible one work around to cancel a reservation is to mark it as the guest did not show up which you can do as the reservation is live you then can cancel and choose to not give them a refund. At worst guest will call booking.com and the guest also will not get any support so it is kind of a wash. 

​@Joseph Coker FWIW I have slogged my way through to a solution for the fact that Booking.com’s phone numbers seem to be marked as spam by Verizon at the carrier level. In other words, I have figured out how to get BDC’s “callback authentication” to actually work with Verizon.

Because Verizon has flagged BDC’s numbers at the carrier-level (not the device level), this means that depending on the “Call Filter” settings on your Verizon account, the call might not even be ringing through to your phone AT ALL. (And even if it does, it then has to make it through whatever additional call screening tools are being used at the device level of your own phone, such as Google’s “Call Screen” features).

Through tedious trial and error and I have found these settings to work for being able to receive callbacks from BDC:

Note: These instructions are for a web browser. Not sure if steps are the same on the MyVerizon app.

Log onto VerizonWireless.com
Navigate: [Hamburger Menu] > Account > My Devices > Device Overview > [Select Device] > Settings & preferences > Call Filter > Settings
Choose "Auto-block spam calls by risk level"
Choose "High-risk only" under "Choose the calls to auto-block"
Click Save
Reboot the phone (not sure if this is really necessary, but can't hurt)

I think I’ve been having similar issues with Vrbo support trying to call me. I think these settings should probably fix that as well. 

--Tom

This is incredible, well done. But I guess the thing that is insane to me is that bdc is a huge company, how can they not solve this where airbnb can and how come it takes people like you basically hacking the system to get their stupid call. Its so stupid