Why Booking.com SUCKS for Hosts

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What's up guys, my name is James and in today's video, I want to talk about booking.com. I specifically want to talk about some of the downsides of booking.com. And what I think is the best strategy for hosts, you want to get more bookings and more revenue on their listings, whether that's someone who is managing their own listing, you're a host of your own property, or whether you want to start managing other people's properties.

And you want to learn how you can maximize the income of those properties, number of bookings and the dollar value of those bookings. So that number one, you can provide more value to your clients. And number two, you can earn higher management fees on each one of the properties that you manage.

There's a couple key tips I'm going to share with you in this training video in this video here, so hopefully, this is really valuable to you. If it is, then click the like button, please do me a favor and just click that like button. It really helps me out with YouTube's algorithm. And if you want to learn more about everything involved with optimizing properties and managing other people's properties on Airbnb, than just check out the links down the description below, there's some free training that I link to down there as well, that'll be really, really valuable and a lot more in depth in this video.

So to start off with let's talk about booking.com. Now, historically, on booking.com, one of the biggest disadvantages of how of using booking.com, as a platform over Airbnb or vrbo homeaway was that you had to process your own payments. What I mean by this is that a guest would book a property and submit their credit card details that you would then need to go and put into a payment processor like stripe or square to be able to actually run that credit card and collect that money.

Now that is a problem for a number of reasons, for most hosts is a really big issue just because number one, they don't have any kind of payment processor actually set up. Now you have to remember booking comm was built around hotels, and so telles prefer to do it that way. So they could run the transactions through their own merchant processing account. Or oftentimes just run the charge when the client actually shows up when the guest actually shows up at the property and is ready to check in. Now for home sharing, it doesn't work that way.

Obviously, there's no one at the property to charge that guest card, or to verify that that part is actually legitimate. And it's owned by them collect the driver's license, things like that. And so not only is it a real hassle for hosts from an administration point of view, but it's also a really big hassle from a standpoint of protecting against any kind of fraud, I can speak from my own personal experience that using booking.com.

As a as a short term rental host was an absolute nightmare, the amount of fraudulent credit cards that were used to book properties that we that we manage was astronomical, it just is never something that happens with Airbnb because you as a host never have to deal with that. Whereas with booking.com, it's a really great easy way for people to test out stolen credit cards, fake credit cards and the like. And the problem is a lot of the time, these charges are going to go through initially, and then you're going to be stuck high and dry when they get reported back as fraud and the money gets taken out of your account.

Now that's a really big issue. And so booking.com has released and started to roll out payment processing for some listings, which is nice. However, you unfortunately cannot have them collect a security deposit from your guests. Meaning that if a guest does cause me damages to your property, you're going to be high and dry unless you collect the security deposit yourself. There's a couple other factors a couple of they're kind of issues with their Pam processing that just essentially mean that it's nowhere near where Airbnb is, is in terms of the ease of use and the protection that you have as a host of your own property.

So for that reason, if you're looking to expand over to other booking platforms in order to grow your revenue, get more eyeballs on your property, I highly recommend that you think twice before expanding out to booking.com. And the reality is that a lot of different platforms out there all have different nuances, different unique things about them that you need to know in order to expand out to them. And the other reality is that most of your bookings are still going to come from booking.com.

On most properties, there are some properties that are better suited for vrb Oh, typically those are larger family units. There are some units that are better suited towards booking.com more hotel like units. But for the majority of hosts and the majority of properties, you're going to find that the majority of your bookings will come from Airbnb. So whatever platform you're on right now, I would recommend as a first step when you're looking to optimize your bookings maximize the revenue coming from that listing.

The first thing to do before expanding on multiple different platforms and complicating your life unnecessarily, is to really really double down and optimize on the property that you are listed on whether that's VR vo Airbnb or if you are currently booked Set up on booking.com. And having good success there, and you've got the systems nailed down to be able to use it even with its disadvantages, then I highly recommend taking the time to really understand how that platforms algorithm works, and how you can better optimize your property for success on that platform.

Now, we've got a ton of great videos on this channel here that talk about the specifics of how to optimize a property on Airbnb. And really, it comes down to just understanding their algorithm understanding how to properly price your listing, understanding how to set it up so that guests are going to be attracted to click it, and then it shows up high in the search results, and they ultimately end up booking, there's a lot that goes into it, there's a lot that you can learn in order to optimize it.

And from my experience, that is going to provide you with much better results than simply trying to expand out to another platform. And it's going to do it without a lot of the headache. So again, if you want more in depth training on exactly what I mean, when I say optimizing a listing, you know optimizing when I talk about optimizing your pricing, getting the highest dollar value for your bookings, then just check out the links down below to the free training that we have that walk you through those things step by step by step. Now, for anyone managing properties, or anyone looking to start managing properties.

For other people on Airbnb, this is the skill of all skills, this is how you're going to be able to provide enough value to your property owners that they're going to want to stick around with you long term for several years into the future. Because the truth is, if you're able to really master this skill of optimizing performance on Airbnb, and other booking platforms, that is where you're then able to go and take a property and increase its performance by so much that you're virtually paying for yourself in managing the property.

You know, now we've gotten to the point where all of our systems are so dialed in. And the systems that we see that we teach in our trainings are linked down below are so dialed in that if they're applied properly, you can go in to 90% of all hosts on short term rental platforms, and take their listing up by 1020 30%. So you can easily charge a 20% management fee and still have the property owner netting just as much as they were before you are managing or more. That is a real Win win.

Now the value proposition is that they're going to save time and make just as much money or more than they were before you managing. And that's how we create a real long term Win win with our clients and create a business that really has longevity. So again, if you want to check that out and learn more about the exact steps that go into that, then I highly recommend checking out the trainings that are linked down below.

And if you got value from this video, then please take a quick half a second and click that like button down the bottom right hand corner that helps you tremendously with YouTube's algorithm. So if you can take a half a second and just click that like button, it would mean a lot to me and really help me out. Also, if you're new to the channel here and you want to stay up to date with the new videos, we post twice every single week, then just click that subscribe button there, you'll subscribe to the channel and you'll be notified when we post new videos twice every single week so you can keep up to date with us and keep learning along with us. I hope all as well and I will see you in the next video.