Totally agree this is frustrating and Booking should take responsibility here. I would deactivate your advertisement until payments service have been enabled. For the time being just rent via AirBNB or other platforms. Moving forward without a solution from Booking will only cause all the fake bookings to consume to much manual efforts and potential risk of non shows.
Thanks for your recommendations. I'm lucky to have the Payment by Booking.com activated in the meantime and good tip to change the policies what I've done in the meantime. For any future request I expect not to face any more fake bookings based on these settings. Unfortunately I still have to deal with couple guests who already made a booking based on the old terms...
I've red the comments you posted and recognize your situation. I also have a 'self catering model' where guests can pick-up the key. Maybe this is causing that I can't use the payment by Booking.com right from the beginning. Or maybe it has to do with the country. Still in both situations I recommend to consider couple of times if you want to publish your property right from the beginning after registering because I want to prevent anybody from having a similar experience.
I do understand Booking.com want to validate if a property is real but there are several ways of doing this. It might be a consideration to also protect the host (or at least warn them) for fake booking in case you are not allowed to make use of the Payment by Booking.com service. I'm a super host at a competitive service and never had any fake booking or last minute cancelation using their service and hosted over 100 guests last 1,5 year.
Totally agree this is frustrating and Booking should take responsibility here. I would deactivate your advertisement until payments service have been enabled. For the time being just rent via AirBNB or other platforms. Moving forward without a solution from Booking will only cause all the fake bookings to consume to much manual efforts and potential risk of non shows.
Thanks for your recommendations. I'm lucky to have the Payment by Booking.com activated in the meantime and good tip to change the policies what I've done in the meantime. For any future request I expect not to face any more fake bookings based on these settings. Unfortunately I still have to deal with couple guests who already made a booking based on the old terms...
I've red the comments you posted and recognize your situation. I also have a 'self catering model' where guests can pick-up the key. Maybe this is causing that I can't use the payment by Booking.com right from the beginning. Or maybe it has to do with the country. Still in both situations I recommend to consider couple of times if you want to publish your property right from the beginning after registering because I want to prevent anybody from having a similar experience.
I do understand Booking.com want to validate if a property is real but there are several ways of doing this. It might be a consideration to also protect the host (or at least warn them) for fake booking in case you are not allowed to make use of the Payment by Booking.com service. I'm a super host at a competitive service and never had any fake booking or last minute cancelation using their service and hosted over 100 guests last 1,5 year.