Should You List Your Property on Booking.com | The STRR Podcast #93 | Tim Hubbard

We have lots of choices on where to list our short term rentals. Airbnb, VRBO, booking.com I want to talk about those options this week and one in particular, booking.com and whether or not you should put your short term rentals on there or not. Stay tuned. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches, where we'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals to help you build wealth faster with as little headache as possible.

This week we're talking about booking.com you've probably heard of them. They're one of the largest OTAs, or online travel agencies, as they're referred to in the world. In the world. They have lots and lots of listings. And I want to talk about whether or not you should put your rentals on there for more exposure. I've used booking.com in the past, so I'm going to be speaking directly from, from my experience. So let's just go ahead and get right into it. So as investors, we're always looking to increase our revenues in a stable way, right? And so by going on more and more OTAs or online travel agencies, that's a way for us to easily increase our exposure to our short term rentals, which means we're gonna have more people looking at them, more demand, which means hypothetically, we should be able to rent those for more. We should be able to rent our properties for more if we have more people looking at it. So I've experimented with this a ton. I've been on lots and lots of different listing sites. Some tiny ones you probably never heard of, but also a lot of the big ones. Currently I'm on Airbnb, I'm on VRBO and HomeAway, which also links into the Expedia network. So if you're on vrbo, you maybe didn't know, but you're also on Expedia. And I've also been on booking.com and tripadvisor. I've been on booking.com since twice. And I was just. I just gave him another chance, I guess I would say. So. Spoiler alert. I'm no longer using booking.com but I want to tell you why. And some things to consider. I want to go over the setup. If you're considering using booking.com some of the pros and cons and just how to decide if we should go on more listing channels or not. So let's just start with some of the stats. Booking.com is one of the largest OTAs in the world. They have over 28 million listings. Now, it used to be a lot more hotel focused and there's still tons of hotels on there. Actually, I would say that probably dominates their listings, but now they've got it. All. Right, to compete against Airbnb and to compete against vrbo, you can rent apartments on there. You can rent all sorts of different types of listings, but they historically have been geared more towards hotels. And so you're going to find if you go on booking.com that the guests that are booking your properties, they're going to have a little bit more of a hotel type experience in mind. Actually, you know, one of the payment options, for example, on booking.com is for guests to pay at your property. Now, if you've been listening to the show for a while, you know that we try to automate all of our operations so we use digital locks. And clearly if we're using digital locks, we have a self check in. Well, we're not going to be accepting payments. Right. That's more for a hotel that has a lobby, that has a staff. So let's talk a little bit more about the setup. They have what they call their extranet, which is for property owners. It's your dashboard for booking.com where you can see all your listings, you can see your cancellation policies, you can see payment options, stuff like that. So keep in mind, if you're thinking about going on booking.com or branching out, maybe you're just on Airbnb right now. There's lots of software to help us integrate the calendars. You can use Hostfully or Hostaway or your Porter or Smart bnb. These are all management software programs that will help you integrate those. But the calendar integration is not really the most difficult part. That's actually pretty, pretty easy. What becomes a little more difficult is that you're gonna have a whole different set of cancellation policies. They're not going to be exactly like Airbnb's. They're not going to be exactly like homeaways. So keep that in mind. You also have this different type of guest that's booking your rental, that's going to have more experience. Or I guess if they've been using booking.com for a while, they've probably stayed in more hotels. So if you're renting an apartment or whatever it is, that might be a little new to them, and, and that again, is creating like an expectation there. So their expectations might be different than what it actually is. So keep that in mind. Pricing and accepting payments. Now, this is a tricky1 with booking.com if you're using VRBO and Homeway already. You know that we accept payments on behalf of our guests. Most all of us are using Stripe for that. Stripe makes it really easy. It's a one of the biggest payment processing companies in the world. So they integrate with all these property management programs as well. So that's what we use. But Booking.com's guests, I guess I would say this is in a nutshell. The reason why I've stopped using booking.com for the second time is that we get a lot of invalid payments. We get people giving us credit cards that they have insufficient funds or whatever it is. I feel like there's more ways that people have figured out how to kind of trick the booking.com system. So we just had a lot of experience, bad experience with guests and invalid cards and trying to call them, and then the contact was an invalid number. It just became quite difficult. So that's the big reason that we're not using them now. But it doesn't mean that they're not right for you. And of course, I've got dozens of properties now, so it's a little harder to track each property versus maybe only have a couple. That's going to be a lot easier. Right. You can nail these things down right away. So booking.com just hasn't been that for me. We did get a lot of bookings from there. I would say that. So if, you know, it comes down to, should you go on these other OTAs? Well, are you not staying booked? If you're not staying booked, there could be several reasons for that. Not enough listing. Exposure clearly can be one of them, but it might be your pricing, might be your reviews. So check those things first before you decide to go to other travel agencies, other OTAs, and create your exposure that way or add your exposure. Because you're going to have to monitor different cancellation policies and different types of guests and different ways of accepting payments. All these things, it just gets a little more. More complicated. So a few of the pros, I mean, with booking.com they are a huge network. They're huge. So you will get bookings if you go on booking.com you will. They just, they have a huge network. They have 24. 7 support. You know, I don't know how good that is. You know, a lot of companies have 24. 7 support and it's still pain in the butt to work with them. I guess the cons is that, you know, we get lots of bad payments, we get some people trying to cheat the stuff system a Little more often than they would maybe with another platform. You have to manage all those different policies, cancellation policies. Also, your reviews are going to be coming into a different channel now, so you got to check that. So there's definitely some pros. If you want more exposure and you have the resources to manage these guests and just stay on top of those payments, then I'd say go for it. Try them out. Hopefully you're using a property management software already and you can integrate really easily. You don't have to recreate your whole listing. With booking.com they have the ability to sync with a lot of these property management software so they can pull the information in for you. So that's a pro as well. I would say one more pro to being on multiple platforms is that you're not reliant on one. If you have an issue with Airbnb, for example, if you guys listen to the podcast for a while, you know, they took my listings down on one of my accounts without telling me, without notifying me. On the dashboard, I lost, I don't know, tens of thousands of dollars. It was only down for a week before we noticed. So it does create more exposure and it lessens your risk, you know, being on one platform. So that's another benefit. So check it out if you're interested. It could be right for you, or you might have similar experiences. I just wanted to share my recent experience trying booking.com out for the second time and giving them the no again. So wherever you are out there, thank you for listening. If you guys haven't already, head to strrriches.com that's our website that supports the podcast and our YouTube channel. And we have tons of great resources on there. In fact, I have a section on there just called Recommended Resources, and I have all my favorite software programs and books and all these things that I've been using to build my business. So check that out. If you haven't. And if you haven't left us a review, I would really appreciate it. Until next time. Hopefully you guys are doing well with your real estate portfolios and have a wonderful day.