How to List your Property on Booking.com 2023 | Tim Hubbard

Well, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I've been on booking.com in the past. I've had all my properties on there and I've taken them all off. But I am back. I've got all my properties back on booking.com I think you should have yours on there as well. So this week I want to give you a beginner's guide, how to get back onto booking.com or get there in the first place. And a couple things you'll want to be weary of. Stay tuned. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Every week here we talk about how your short term rentals can perform better, how you can protect your properties easier, and how you can make your operations as passive as possible. One of the things that goes into generating more income is having occupancy. And the more OTAs we have our properties on, hopefully the more occupancy we have. And so OTAS, an online travel agency, booking.com just happens to be the largest one in the world. They're conglomerate. They have multiple other companies underneath them like Kayak and Agoda. And in total, they have over 28 million listings. That is a ton. And that's plenty of reason to put your properties on on booking.com but it's not that easy. Well, I shouldn't say it's not that easy. It's easy to get started with them, but there are a few things to consider. So that's what I want to talk about today. How you can get started with them, how they can accept payments on your behalf now, which is a new feature and could be really helpful for a lot of you. Then I want to talk about the type of guests that you're actually going to attract on booking.com so it's easier than ever to join booking.com you can just go to booking.com's website. You're going to, you're going to create a new listing, just as you would with Airbnb. Now, if you already have an Airbnb listing, well, you can actually import a lot of your details directly into booking.com and you will see that as you start down their process. But let's just say you were starting from scratch. How would you put your property on booking.com you go to their Create new listing button. And they'll just walk you through. They need to know all the features of your property. You'll need to upload photos and descriptions. We have plenty of podcasts in the past about these topics. So if you haven't seen our website yet, str riches.com you can go in there, you can search for whatever you want. We've got a lot of episodes in there and we've talked about a lot of these things. But today we're getting started with booking.com and it's easy. Why is it easier now than it ever has been? Well, they want to compete with Airbnb. They want more bookings, and to do that they're gonna need more properties. And so they wanna make that as easy as possible. So pretty straightforward. You basically just enter your property information into booking.com unless you want to pull it in from Airbnb or VRBO if you have it on there. If you do have a property management software platform where you are managing your property, I highly recommend the one I use is Hostaway. Well, they integrate with booking.com as well and so do a lot of other ones. But the thing with property management software is that they don't always integrate everything. So with Hostway, for example, I know that you can sync it up with booking.com but we still have a lot of amenities and things like that that we actually have to go into booking.com to enter in. So if you're using a property management software, check there first. Check to see if you can integrate directly with booking.com if you're just on Airbnb, just on VRBO, well, you can pull those details in as well. So once you have your property set up, you of course want to make sure that your calendars are synced so you don't get a booking in booking.com and not know about it. Or have a double booking in Airbnb that is EAS easy to do as well. They have a sync feature, so once your property's in there, you can just sync your two calendars together. They use what they call an ical link, pretty common in the short term rental space. So that is easy to do. Don't let that intimidate you. It's easy to get started. It's easy to get on there. A couple things to note once you're on there. First of all, they do charge you a commission, so they charge 15% at least at the time of this recording. Now, if you're using a property management software, one nice things about it is that you can increase your prices for specific channels. So you may want to increase your prices just for booking.com so you could do that by just adding a percentage increase just to the booking.com channel, while maybe you leave Airbnb without an increase. So that is something that you can do as well. So keep in mind they do charge that 15% commission and up until recently, you had to take payments on behalf of your reservations. That was not something that booking.com would do for you. But, but they do have that feature available now. So they want to compete with Airbnb. Now, it's not going to be a feature that's available from day one, at least not from the, the moment of this recording, but you will have that feature available to you very soon afterwards. They will collect your payment for you, which means you won't have any fraudulent reservations. They won't allow someone to book if it's fraudulent. They won't allow someone to book if their card is declined. If someone doesn't show up to your booking or they cancel, well, you still get paid if you are using booking.com payments. So that is some great news. So check out payments by booking.com after you have your listing on there. It's not something you have to do, so if you're not using it. And remember, your policies can be different than everyone else's on booking.com in terms of your cancellation policy and things like that. So you want to make sure that you double check all that as well because that's going to line up with them taking your payments. One thing you're going to want to be very wary of though, if you Decide to use Booking.com's payment feature, is that they're not going to collect a deposit on your behalf.

I know it's like they're making it easier for us, but they're potentially creating more risk for us by not having a deposit. So if you, you're taking the payment using Stripe, which Stripe is the most well known payment processor for anyone that wants to handle their own bookings. It integrates with a lot of the property management platforms and they do a really good job of just making it easy. You can also take your deposits through there. So if you're not using a property management software platform, make sure you check out Stripe and you want to open up account. You can do it for free and you can take payments directly through there as well as deposits. But if you use Booking, they're not going to collect a deposit on your behalf. They do have a $300. I guess you could call it authorization where the guest agrees to pay up to $300 if there is damage. But as we know, that doesn't really hardly cover anything, does it? So that is up to you. That is unfortunate news. I'm trying this out with some properties, just the smaller ones, the smaller one bedroom units. But of course, if you've got a really nice big vacation rental, well, then you're probably going to want to collect a deposit outside of Booking.com's payments. To do that again, you're going to use stripe. There are a couple other things that you want to do just to protect your property a little more. First of all, your booking policies. You want to make sure that they're pretty strict and you're comfortable with them. If the guest doesn't agree, well, then you don't have to accept the reservation. One thing that we do is we don't allow booking.com reservations unless we have a three day window at the time of this recording. It's a three day window to where we have more time to chat with the guest, to fill them out, to look at past reviews and make sure there's nothing suspicious before we let them into our property or send our send them our check in instructions. So you might want to consider leaving a larger booking window, meaning someone can't book tomorrow and check into your property. Maybe you want to leave a few extra days before versus Airbnb where you feel comfortable and you can do it the day of. So I know there's some good news there that they can accept payments, but the bad news is that they are not accepting deposits at the time of this recording. I think that that's something that they'll do soon as they really want to compete with Airbnb. But overall, I still recommend that you get on booking.com you're going to attract more guests. Just a few stats about the guests that you might attract on booking.com says 75% of the nights booked are by guests with five or more previous book bookings. That's good news, right? You know that they're not bad guests or damaging properties. 68% of nights booked are by families and couples. So if you have a property that's set up more for families, well, booking.com could help you out a little bit more. 42% of nights booked are for properties other than hotels. So booking.com sort of started originally with hotels and they've branched out over the last years with apartments and competing properties similar to Airbnb. So a lot of their reservations now are Coming from properties other than hotel. And lastly, they do attract a ton of international guests. I know personally when I'm traveling around the world, I use booking.com quite a bit because it's something I'm already familiar with and they just kind of make it easy. And now if you're using booking.com, it's going to be even easier for your international guests to book with you if you're also using their payment feature because they can use some international forms of payment like PayPal, which up until now have been a little more difficult through booking.com I know personally traveling here in Brazil, where I am now, and in Colombia before I had bank accounts set up in these places, trying to pay on some of these online websites is a pain in the butt. They they decline your card even if it's open to international charges. And so if you're using payments.com, it's going to help you attract more international guests as well. But I realize you might be a little concerned still if you stay tuned till next week, I have a solution for you, a potential solution, I should say, to allow you to use booking.com, to allow you to use their payments feature, but also protect your properties as well without really having to do too much. So In a nutshell, Booking.com is the largest OTA in the world. They are really trying to compete with Airbnb. So they are bringing in new features to make it easier for us, us as owners to put our properties on there. I do suggest that you get your property on there if you're looking for any more exposure. If your occupancy is down, remember that the type of guest coming from booking.com it's probably going to be a little different than what you're used to. Might be an international guest, but at the end of the day, if it helps boost your occupancy and they're good guests, helps boost your revenue, I think it's a win. So make sure you check it out. And if you, if worse comes to worse and you don't like it or you have some issues, well, you can cancel. I don't think the setup's going to take you more than maybe 30 minutes, so check it out until next time. I hope you have a wonderful week and we'll see you soon.

Want to get on the fast track to financial freedom through short term rentals? Well, it all starts with the properties you acquire, but you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties. I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that. There is no charge. It's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers. Just go to restmethods.com that's R E S T methods dot com.