You should be able to figure out who we are, if you are looking for some way to harass us.
Over five years I'd say we've had about 500 reviews on BDC. Since we started reducing our reliance on BDC after the "address field" fiasco, we're getting far fewer reviews --- only 88 are currently active, average 9.6. Our average was 9.7 until the 2.0 review we got last week.
Our business relies entirely on our reputation, as does our definition of success. From that standpoint, we find the latest error from BDC absolutely intolerable.
Now that you've edited your comments, they are correct. Only the guest can request revision of the review, even if the error is obvious.
But of course expecting a guest to squander the 20 minutes to contact booking.com, then wait for it to send him a new link authorizing him to replace the review, is a pretty bad bet.
Sorry, but that does not cut it for me. We've worked too hard to build this place to allow some faceless corporate bureaucracy to place our golden reputation at risk -- most likely just to protect the internal reputation of some overpaid executive who sold this dumb idea. The review launch is a disaster, but they will defend it no matter what evidence is presented to them, and what you and I say does not matter a whit.
Fortunately, we ARE in a position to pick & choose. When booking.com summarily decided to curtail guest address data (removing the US state field, they claimed, would increase booking completions), and reneged on its longstanding promise to pre-vet credit cards, we took steps to reduce our reliance on it. When the company ignored us on these issues, we knew we would probably have to leave eventually.
We've since boosted in-house bookings from about 12% to nearly 25%. Airbnb is also picking up steam, and we're confident we can replace booking.com with Expedia -- which I'm sure has its own problems, but for now there's a clean slate. We're headed into the down season, too, so its the perfect time to transit out.
I just finished removing every reference to booking.com on our website. We've removed almost all our available rooms from the booking.com extranet calendar. If we don't receive an meaningful acknowledgement to our complaint about the new system and a plan to address it --- and we expect neither -- we will cancel our contract with the company.
Your experience does not reflect the current reality., Booking.com will not remove the review as a matter of policy, even when it is fully aware that overall score does not reflect the reviewer's intent.
Alas, we have learned that booking.com's claims about being responsive to partners are not really true. We are routinely ignored. It is only a handful of very large hotel chains with huge marketing power that have any influence at all over what booking.com does, and even they they aren't pleased, from what I understand.
The company is entirely unaccountable to us "partners", as far as I can tell, and this is just the final straw.
Booking.com claims to have done as you suggest -- that now, if the six-score average is different from the overall score by five points or more, the guest is warned. But our guest in the above review saw no such warning. He confirms he did not intend to leave us such a bad score, but he is also at a loss as to how to correct it. It will stay, probably.
Our review score can only deteriorate under the new system anyway. With only a single data point determining overall score, the highest possible "barely-less-than-perfect" score is now 9.0 rather than 9.6.
In our view, the launch of the new system was both ill-considered and incompetently executed, and unfortunately it is not the first such experience we've had with booking.com (although it is by far the most serious).
Yes, not yet anyway, and we can live with a 9.6. But under this system, our score can only go down no matter how hard we work.
As it stands, we will be getting 9.0s (9.0 is now the the highest "almost perfect" score), not 9.6s.
And BDC is happily mixing the two data sets together as if doing so were statistically valid, which it isn't.
You should be able to figure out who we are, if you are looking for some way to harass us.
Over five years I'd say we've had about 500 reviews on BDC. Since we started reducing our reliance on BDC after the "address field" fiasco, we're getting far fewer reviews --- only 88 are currently active, average 9.6. Our average was 9.7 until the 2.0 review we got last week.
Our business relies entirely on our reputation, as does our definition of success. From that standpoint, we find the latest error from BDC absolutely intolerable.
And many guests, we're learning the hard way, will put the slider at 1 or 2 thinking they are the highest scores they can give.
Now that you've edited your comments, they are correct. Only the guest can request revision of the review, even if the error is obvious.
But of course expecting a guest to squander the 20 minutes to contact booking.com, then wait for it to send him a new link authorizing him to replace the review, is a pretty bad bet.
Sorry, but that does not cut it for me. We've worked too hard to build this place to allow some faceless corporate bureaucracy to place our golden reputation at risk -- most likely just to protect the internal reputation of some overpaid executive who sold this dumb idea. The review launch is a disaster, but they will defend it no matter what evidence is presented to them, and what you and I say does not matter a whit.
Fortunately, we ARE in a position to pick & choose. When booking.com summarily decided to curtail guest address data (removing the US state field, they claimed, would increase booking completions), and reneged on its longstanding promise to pre-vet credit cards, we took steps to reduce our reliance on it. When the company ignored us on these issues, we knew we would probably have to leave eventually.
We've since boosted in-house bookings from about 12% to nearly 25%. Airbnb is also picking up steam, and we're confident we can replace booking.com with Expedia -- which I'm sure has its own problems, but for now there's a clean slate. We're headed into the down season, too, so its the perfect time to transit out.
I just finished removing every reference to booking.com on our website. We've removed almost all our available rooms from the booking.com extranet calendar. If we don't receive an meaningful acknowledgement to our complaint about the new system and a plan to address it --- and we expect neither -- we will cancel our contract with the company.
Your experience does not reflect the current reality., Booking.com will not remove the review as a matter of policy, even when it is fully aware that overall score does not reflect the reviewer's intent.
Alas, we have learned that booking.com's claims about being responsive to partners are not really true. We are routinely ignored. It is only a handful of very large hotel chains with huge marketing power that have any influence at all over what booking.com does, and even they they aren't pleased, from what I understand.
The company is entirely unaccountable to us "partners", as far as I can tell, and this is just the final straw.
Booking.com claims to have done as you suggest -- that now, if the six-score average is different from the overall score by five points or more, the guest is warned. But our guest in the above review saw no such warning. He confirms he did not intend to leave us such a bad score, but he is also at a loss as to how to correct it. It will stay, probably.
Our review score can only deteriorate under the new system anyway. With only a single data point determining overall score, the highest possible "barely-less-than-perfect" score is now 9.0 rather than 9.6.
In our view, the launch of the new system was both ill-considered and incompetently executed, and unfortunately it is not the first such experience we've had with booking.com (although it is by far the most serious).