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Ilaria - Community Manager
Question of the week: Are you protecting yourself against online crime?
Hi everyone,
As a Booking.com partner, you have access to customer data, including names, addresses, credit card details and phone numbers. That’s a lot of sensitive information that could fall into the wrong hands.
How aware are you of issues like social engineering or phishing? And what do you do to protect yourself against them?
Ilaria
I insist all guest payments are made through Booking,com. Then, I shortly wait for the payment to be deposited into my bank account by Booking,com. I will not personally accept a credit card from the arriving guests.
Also, I only communicate with my upcoming guests via the Booking,com messaging platform and not through each other's private e-mails. This avoids e-mail hacking.
We do the same as Don - all payments made through Booking.com using Payments by Booking.com so that we never see credit card details etc. We also take online payments through AirBnB, TripAdvisor and HomeAway, all payments being processed online by them.
Booking.com do not reserve funds against customers cards for damage deposits. This means we have to give out bank details for guests to pay us directly by bank transfer. It's very disappointing that Booking.com put us at risk by refusing to protect us.
What are Booking.com doing to protect us, the property owners, from fraud and other crime?
We do the same as Don & Isle of Wight.
But the process to enable Payments by Booking.com take longer time to verified. One of my properties almost 2 month still not eligible for that option. Support team keeps replied the same robot message "The ‘No Prepayment’ restriction will be lifted after you’ve been received a certain number of stayed reservations and reviews, and consistently paid your invoices. For security reasons, we can’t specify the exact number of bookings and reviews required to reach this threshold."
Kinda disappointed with this system.
FYI, I have a couple of properties which age 2 years and more.
Ilaria thank you for this very useful post information.
Booking.com facilitates payments for me so I feel very secure.
I only communicate with my guests through my Extranet message tab.
The problem is that most of the times guests do not reply to my messages making me feel insecure.
Communicating with guests before arriving gives me the chance to get to know them better and try to meet their expectations.
Fraud and crime nowadays is everywhere, so hopefully BDC can find as many solutions as possible to protect us.
I use common sense.