Booking.com, The Good The Bad and The Ugly

Good: There's a lot about booking.com that gives you much more direct control and Airbnb or HomeAway does. A real security deposit, unlike Airbnb with their synthetic deposit. Immediate changes to my profile stuff and amenities and they even call me to confirm and see if there's anything else they can do for me

Bad: guests get my phone number. Like, they think I am going to chat with guests at work??? My exact address is listed on the search results. Security issue. They definitely have a hotel mentality.

Ugly. Confusing when you first start trying to thread a property into the system. Nothing is obvious and it does peculiar things you don't anticipate

IT DEPENDS.

1. In my case, it defaulted to saying that I will collect deposit in "Cash" at check in( which I never do - I am 700 miles away), and I had to explain to each of the 3 renters that secdep will be by credit card.

2. Every time I need to change something like property headline I need to call them. And forget any meaningful property description - there isn't any except for some crude concoction created by some computer algorithm from amenities.
Crazy.

3. Phone number - non issue. I have Google Voice number that is specifically for my rental business. I can set it up to go to voice mail between X and Y hours of day. If they leave a message , it transcribes it and send to my email. I can text them back or call back at my convenience. That is for ALL bookings, not just B.com

4. yes , agreed. confusing

5. Biggest one of all (pun intended) no bookings form Booking dot com.

1) that is why I started with payments by booking.com, I ain't collecting at the door. I went payments already have been made

2) I both got somebody who's willing to change a property name to what I wanted, and someone who told me the 25-character max. You may have to send in emails a few time to get somebody will help you

3) great idea on the Google Voice. Truthfully, the concept of instant booking is to not have to talk to everyone except for problems. I got a booking,, and they called me a minute later to chat. They booked one night, they wanted to check in 6 hours early, and then they used the early cancellation. I wasn't really ready for clients, but due to booking.com confusing setup I set one property to live trying to figure out how to do things. I don't want to chat. The voicemail with text sounds great. Thanx.

Sort of the opposite of Airbnb and HomeAway try not to give you the contact information when you want it . Why can't these listing sites just find a simple and logical way that doesn't make life miserable?

4)

Some of our users have access to something called Call Center which is a virtual dialer (with your own custom phone number in your area code) that lets you make calls from OwnerRez. We've been sitting on it for a long time. In the near future, when SMS is released, everyone will have access to it. Not only can you register your own business virtual number, you can receive SMS in/out of it and you can set voicemail, After Hours forwards and more. I hate to tease people by mentioning this early but couldn't resist.

Exactly like Google Voice. You can port the number, yes. You'd port it out of Google Voice and into our VOIP provider (Twilio) and we'd then have to map it for you. I confirmed that Twilio does support porting.

My #1 goal is to stop instant bookers (especially new to a listing site) from dialing me up to confirm or "have a nice chat" or to complain about trivial things. I aint a bed and breakfast, and I dont want to get random calls - I already am hesitant answering due to robocalls and being at work or asleep.

I was surprised by Booking.com in giving out a phone number. I ONLY want to talk "through the AirBnB/VRBO/Booking.com" communication channel. I stayed at 3 b.coms last year, and I never called the host - we texted I believe. What gives with calling me 1 minute after he instant booked??? When someone calls, I have NO idea which property they booked or what days or what they did or who they are.

Otherwise, instant booking does not have value to me. 1 booking, 1 guy wanting to chat up what he had just done and then he cancelled in two hours. Text me, guy!!!