JasmineCottage
I live in the lovely UK county of Shropshire with my even lovelier wife Yvonne. We love the outdoor life - hillwalking, bird watching, travelling. We love hosting on Booking.com, we're honoured when our guests choose to stay at Jasmine Cottage, and we do our utmost to make their holidays special.
I have the same issue, a guest wishes to book an extra night. In my reservations tab it gives me the option to Request Cancellation or Change Reservation Dates. When I select Change Reservation Dates and increase the length of stay, it says "Oops, it's not possible to apply this change. Make sure the length of stay remains unchanged."
Other than sitting in an interminably long phone queue, any ideas?
We hope you've managed to reopen by the way.
Sorry to hear this Kerem, it's getting ridiculous now.
Thankfully it's working for our property and it looks like we may retain our Preferred Partner status (fingers crossed).
We've got a very similar problem. Our figures for the last 30 days are: no searches, no views and 7 bookings! How is this possible?? We've also slid down the rankings alarmingly and our bookings from BDC are well down on previous years. We've also had vaguely threatening emails from them telling us that we have 60 days to improve our performance score, otherwise we'll be thrown off the Preferred Partner scheme. Other channels are picking up the slack so ultimately it will be BDC's loss, but it is very frustrating.
Airbnb don't charge commission on cleaning fees. As it happens, we received a booking for 5 nights yesterday and the total fee was just £12.78. Airbnb charge a large booking fee (around 15%) directly to the customer.
I know that there were allegations that some hosts may have been charging large fees to avoid paying commission payments to B.com. I also know that, instead of dealing with this issue, B.com added commission to all fees, whether legitimate or bogus.
I opened this thread to find out what other self catering holiday cottage owners feel about the cleaning fee commission now that it's been in operation for a few months.
We send the check in/check out times and the key safe code by email and ask the guests to confirm receipt. It's a bit of extra work but worth it to avoid hassle for both parties!
A small section on Sustainability at the bottom of "Property details" has appeared recently. There are only three attributes at the moment, hopefully B.com will add more. For instance, we pay a premium for 100% renewable electricity but there's nowhere for us to let potential customers know this.
It's a good point - how can BDC tell if a cleaning fee is genuine or, as you say, if someone is doing their own cleaning and adding a fee to save the commission? I read somewhere that BDC took this decision because big hotel chains were adding bogus local taxes.
The end result of all this is that we've had to increase our cleaning fee to cover our costs AND the BDC commission. That makes all the other channels (TripAdvisor, Airbnb) more competitive so it'll end up being BDC's loss.
That sounds like a good idea. How do you collect the breakage and cleaning fees? We don't live on site and don't always meet our guests so it's a bit more tricky for us.