Booking.com - New properties

Hoping to be live within 2 weeks - But you MUST be on Booking.com

There are dozens of VRs in my small tourist town - season is ramping up.

When you are new, with 6-7 properties, your goal is to fill weekends quickly and get bucks in

So I tested two weeks out in my town (5 guests), and only ONE VR was shown in town. And it is labeled as "Just Added!"

Booking.com - 1 shown as available, click to see 16 more outside of town

AirBnB - 8 shown - click to "see all 477" - superhosts dominate the top - - and of course, they are from all over the area.

VRBO - "1-50 of 300 shown" - and of course, they are from all over the area.

Booking is very much USELESS to me. 2 properties over 8 months, 2 bookings between them (and one was in error when due to OR glitch it allowed 1-night booking which we do not allow). So, meh.

maybe depends on where you are. The other 1/3 of my building, a guesthouse, has been around 15 years, ONLY does Booking.com and they do pretty well.

What are your primary traffic sources, besides direct?

Vrbo, a bit of airbnb. Sprinkles of smbyo. Maybe booking works for guesthouses (shared space)? 0 mine are stand alone mountain log cabins. smoky-mountains-cabin.com/cabins

Not on FlipKey?

I am, but the site is deader than dinosaurs. I do not even count it. I got MAYBE one booking a year with their insane 17% fees. Several inquiries that would lead to nowhere. The latest nail in their coffin was NOT releasing renter's contact after renter booked and paid deposit (now they only release after full balance is paid). So fine, I set mine up to collect 100% upfront, I do not have time or desire to play stupid games trying to evade their human screeners just to communicate with booked guests in order to have my rental agreement signed - because idiotic Tripadvisor censors everything worse than Mao's regime. I guess I wasn't the only one who went to 100% collection upfront. So what do they do: they unilaterally override my settings against my wished and set mine to collect 20% upfront and 80 % later. I am DONE with them. So what I did is I've raised my rates to some exorbitant number so that no one will ever book. I am not getting stupid inquiries (which do not book in 99% of cases anyhow), I do not have time or desire to deal with their bull$.t. But they won't get a DIME from me. And oh, I am not paying $799 for their stupid subscription - I KNOW they bury subscription listings so they are NEVER seen by travelers. Since I have only 3 properties, they would not allow me to use OR channel manager either. Keeping listings there just for the sake of Tripadvisor reviews. They can take their useless website and their totalitarian methods and shove them were sun doesn't shine.

Is that still the case - not releasing guest contact until after fully paid? I know on the API side, it's all released up front regardless of payment. There was a lot of push-back on that. I'm wondering if they changed their tone in recent times or if it's just shown on the API side.

Below is a recent API that pushed over from TripAdvisor. You can see that it's not fully paid (total owed on the right) yet the Gmail and phone and all came through.

Still the case and it is maddening. and they won't let me use API because I only have 3 properties. And as you know their CS is in Timbuktu or somewhere and they have no idea how to do anything other than read canned script.