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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.
If some hosts are indeed putting in a very low base rate and large cleaning fees, BDC should deal with it. They've got all the data and it should be straightforward to sort out.
To use it as an excuse to charge everyone commission for cleaning is the unethical action in my view.
I think Fluff has hit the nail on the head. B.com is built for hotels as that's where the money is. Independent self catering properties are not a big money earner for them so they don't care about them. I read somewhere that some large hotel chains were avoiding paying commission by creating fixed fees. Rather than challenging the hotel chains and sorting out the problem, B.com have applied a blanket commission across all fixed fees, including cleaning. This is unfairly punishing independent self catering properties, but as I said earlier, they're not big earners for B.com so they don't care.
Yes, it used to be a bit confusing but they've improved it recently.
Go to Property>Policies>Additional fees and charges>Edit. When you set up your cleaning fee there's a question "Is this already part of the room/apartment rate?". Make sure you check "No". The cleaning fee will now be added to the price.
You need to be aware that B.com have started deducting commission from cleaning fees, so make sure you build that into the fee too. If your commission rate is 18%, you'll only receive £24.60 when you specify a £30 cleaning fee. Quite a lot of partners are angry about this (including me - why should B.com get commission on cleaning when they have no costs associated with it?) as you'll see from other threads on this site.
I hope that helps.
Genuine resort fees are effectively a tax by the local authority. There is no justification for BDC to add commission to a tax. IF certain partners are abusing the system, BDC should investigate and punish accordingly. Instead they're taking the easy option and punishing everybody - and taking even more money off us in the process.
Hi Katerinka,
Where did you hear about the change to the commission? We run a self catering holiday cottage and we've not received any notification. We contract out the cleaning and it costs us around £70 per booking. We charge the customer a £45 cleaning fee and build the rest into the price. We don't charge extra for electricity or WiFi.
Our most recent booking was received on the 13th May and the commission structure was the same, there was no commission on the cleaning fee. Is it just hotels which are affected?
Hi, I'm not sure what the problem is here as whenever we've had cancellations we can still send messages - although they may not get through as we've never had a response to them!
As a precaution we always keep a record of the guest's phone number as soon as they book, but delete it a year after they've (hopefully!) stayed to comply with data protection.
Sorry it doesn't help your current predicament but you can at least learn from it.
Airbnb take two separate commissions. As an owner you only see the small (approx 3.5%) commission that you are charged so on the face of it, it looks like Airbnb are cheaper than Booking.com. However, the guest has to pay 14% more which you don't see. I only found out the commission rate by asking guests who had complained the price was too high. I phoned Airbnb and they wouldn't tell me the rate, they said it was confidential information between them and the guests! Airbnb pay out about three days after the guests arrive.
Booking.com are far more up front about their commission rates. We pay 18% to be a preferred partner and payments are made as a lump sum in the month following the booking.
I hope that helps,
Ian.