Dishonest guests
Hello everyone!
I'll give little details about the two of 'my' properties. They are both located in the same street, but property 1 (P1) is almost at the bottom of the street, about 250m, while property 2 (P2) is on the very end of the same street, about 1.5km.
Here's my problem: this year has started bad from the booking point of view. For P2 I had two guests within 2 days show up, think it's way too far and high from the beach, and leave while at the same time ignoring our existence (we tried talking to them in real life while they're passing by our property but they just ignore and continue on their way). Obviously they refuse to answer their phones and as soon as we report them to booking.com they decide to answer back. The first guests said that they were in other part of the country (5 hours away from us) and that they had a flat tire so they had to cancel the reservation???? Even though we saw them leave our property while conpletely ignoring us??? The second guests said that they searched for hours and couldn't find us but they unknowingly asked for directions from the owners daughter (me) 5 minutes prior, and also refused to answer the phone????
But this case from today is a cherry on top! We had two rooms reserved at P1. The guests said that they would arrive at around 18:00-19:00 and arrived at 11:00. Ok, no problem, the rooms were clean and ready and we were home. It turns out they were lost and needed help finding us. I sent them our address again but they were kinda not cooperative. Ok no problem, they sent us their location and within 1 minute we were in a car driving to help them. Keep in mind that they refused to answer direct questions about their whereabouts and whether they had a car or not. We arrived in the same street they were in ,the street is extremely small, around 150 meter. We were on the phone with them while apparently being in the same street together, but there is no sight of them. They mentioned the car they were driving but were again extremely not cooperative and they refused to drive 150 meters to the main road. Well, turns out they lied. Within a minute they stopped answering the calls and messages but still we went for a whole hour searching for them in the scorching sun. We tried reaching out to them with 4 diffetent phone numbers but they refused all the calls and ignored all our messages. In the end, we came to the conclusion that they had planned this from the start, maybe they thought that they could get away with paying the cancellation fee.
My family's first three reservations of this year turned out like this. Dishonest guests. How does booking protect us from the people like these? What do we do?
I want to make something clear about todays guests: as soon as we reached the street they "were" in they stopped communicating with us. We had no problems with them prior, it was so sudden and so weird but still we stayed in that street for about an hour more. A couple of hours later and they're still not answering the phone, but we can see that they received our viber messages. That's why we believe this was staged, so they could blame us to the booking.com and avoid paying the cancellation fee!
Also, when we arrived in that street to help them and guide them to our location they refused to meet us and said that they will just wait where they already are.
A little update, we managed to get in contact with them with a 4th phone because they blocked the last 3 numbers and they said that we never showed up and that some good people helped them??? Anyways, I found proof that they made another booking reservation in advance at the location they were apparently lost and where we were looking for them for hours. Another proof that they had this all planed. I already contacted booking.com with the proof, still waiting for their reply!
Hi Milica,
what about the " guest didn't show up" option? Did you click that button?
So ..... you took payment in full at the time of booking using Payments by Booking.com, right?
And you set all bookings to non-refundable, right?
Therefore, you get paid, regardless of whether the guest shows up or not, and you don't have to chase around town to find your guests.
Or .... you made the classic mistake of not using Payments by Booking.com and not setting everything to non-refundable, and opened yourself up to no-shows and fake bookings .....
Of course I use payments by booking, but it never happend something like tjat to me? My every guest appeared.
Maybe, it's a solution for Milicas problem.