Click. 2023: Key insights for vacation rental partners

Booking.com leaders and external experts recently took to the stage in Amsterdam and Miami at our annual partner conference, Click. During the event, they shared some of the opportunities open to vacation rental partners, along with some of the work we’ve been doing to help turn these opportunities into bookings.

Here are some of the key insights from across the sessions. Prefer to watch the video? Click here. 

Three key areas of improvement since Click. 2022

Last year partner feedback broadly fell into three areas: the traveller experience, the partner experience and property risk. At this year’s event, we reflected on some of the work we’ve done to address it – and revealed what we’ve got planned for the year to come. 

1) A better traveller experience
 

What we’ve done since last year:

Feedback last year often said we have too much focus on hotels. As such, we’re placing a much greater emphasis on vacation rentals. This continued investment makes sure travellers are not only aware that vacation rentals are an option on our platform, but could be the right option for them.

This involves analysing customer behaviour and offering the right suggestions at the right touch points, such as adding a checkbox allowing travellers to indicate they are looking for 'entire places’. By doing this, we’re able to help customers find and consider vacation rentals where they might not have before.

Our research has also shown that most guests see different property types as fairly interchangeable, and are often flexible about the type of property they book. As a result, we’re moving from a fixed property type for each listing to a more flexible approach to make sure that your property appears in a greater number of relevant search results so the right guests can find you.

We’re also continuing to adapt our creative campaigns to highlight the benefits of vacation rental properties. One recent insight, for example, is that a large outdoor space is a big reason why travellers choose alternative accommodations, so we’re highlighting this feature to reflect the joy of outdoor space that such properties offer.

Of course, another big part of capturing demand is getting more customers into the Booking.com ecosystem. We’ve been investing in large-scale brand campaigns aiming to generate interest – and bookings – with vacation rentals forming a key part of those campaigns.

What we’re planning this year:

We know that reviews are a key deciding factor for our travellers. This year we’ll be doing even more to help vacation rental partners gain customers’ trust by sourcing External Review Scores faster – ideally within the first week of a property joining the platform. 

We’re also making our Genius loyalty programme more tailored to vacation rentals by piloting a new cleaning fee waiver. This will help you better attract valuable Genius level 2 and 3 guests and further boost your property’s visibility.

2) More peace of mind for our partners
 

What we’ve done since last year:

Feedback from partners last year also expressed concerns about the risk of property damage. We’ve taken steps to address this, including piloting Request-To-Book functionality. This will give you even more control over your property, with the freedom to choose whether it can be instantly booked, or if you need to accept or decline booking requests.

We’re currently piloting this new reservation model for a limited set of new properties in Australia, France and the US. After the pilot, we plan to scale globally.

In addition, we’ve also piloted a Damage Programme, where we handle damage payments on your behalf. You just provide evidence of the damage – we take care of the rest. We’ve now scaled this programme globally (excluding Brazil) to all properties on Payments by Booking.com.

What we’re planning this year:

This year we’re enabling new ways to opt into the Damage Programme at a group level and via Connectivity providers, which will help to reduce some of the manual workload for partners with multiple properties.

3) A better partner experience
 

What we’ve done since last year:

Being able to manage a business on partner level instead of property level was another recurring theme.

To increase portfolio performance, we launched Market Insights in the group extranet and scaled the Market Insights API to all Connectivity providers. Put simply, we offer you a lot of data, but we also want to give you the context and ideas to put that data to use. That means, for example, instead of just saying family demand will grow in the coming months (data), we also suggest that you implement a family rate plan to capitalise on that demand (insight).

We’ve also helped new properties get their first booking faster by providing actionable advice on the most impactful settings to improve their pricing, availability, rate plans and content. 

What we’re planning for this year:

This year we’ll provide even more actionable market insights to help you improve your portfolio performance.

For larger partners, we’re also easing some of the operational overhead regarding payments. Some of the upcoming initiatives include:

• Faster payouts – starting in European countries, we now pay out the day after check-in, making it easier for you to keep a healthy cash flow.
• Bulk onboarding – larger partners in the US and Canada can now onboard multiple properties to Payments by Booking.com in a single click, and manage payout settings in bulk. We’re planning to expand this functionality globally later this year. 
• Easy-to-track cash flow – we’ll further streamline your payments operations by rolling out new functionality such as a monthly financial overview, mapping out all financial outflows in a single place and offering downloadable reports.