We’ve talked a lot about booking.com on this channel before, but I know that a lot of you are still not on the platform, and it can be a gold mine if you know how to set it up properly. And so this week we’re gonna jump all into booking.com in 2025. Talk about some new updates, some things that you need to know and why you should be on the platform.

So why does booking.com deserve a spot in your 2025 strategy? Well, for starters, they’re a hundred million people that use their platform every month, and we know a lot of these guests are international. They’re coming from other countries, and a lot of them are not on Airbnb.

That means if you’re out there and you only have your property listed on an Airbnb or maybe VRBO, then you’re leaving a lot of potential reservations on the table.

It’s also used by business travelers. They have some cool things with their platform, like their genius program, for example, that gives the users discounts the more that they use the program, kind of like a rewards card. And I know myself spending a lot of time out of the us, actually most all my time outta the us.

I use booking.com because some places I travel to, there are not a lot of Airbnb options. And if there are, they’re just not that great. And that genius program is really something that kind of brings you back. So if you’re not on booking.com in 2025, I highly, highly suggest that you jump on there.

It’s gonna help maximize your revenue, fill up some of those vacant spots on your calendar. Let’s go step by step, how to list your property.

So how do you actually set up your property on booking.com? Well, it’s pretty easy. You’re gonna go to partner.booking.com. They’re gonna create a new listing. This is similar to the way you would do it on Airbnb or VRBO. They need to know the necessary information, right? You’re gonna plug in things like your amenities, your descriptions, a title, your photos, which are super, super important.

You wanna make sure you’re taking professional photos. Don’t forget those evening shots. Don’t forget those drone shots.

And don’t forget those shots of places around your property that your guests are going to want to see and going to want to visit.

Now booking dot com’s platform’s a little different than Airbnb. Uh. In the sense that after you put in all of this data, they actually organize it the way that they want. So all of the listing descriptions are organized the same way in booking.com.

No matter what data you have in there, they’re all in the same kind of setup. Whereas in Airbnb, you have a little more flexibility, right? You can create paragraph breaks, you know, you can put in bullet points. Uh, you should be putting in bullet points to really highlight some of those main pieces of your property and make it stand out to someone that’s just skimming through these really, really quickly.

After you have all of your data uploaded, which isn’t going to take you very long, then there’s a bit of a verification progress, and then you’re off running. Now if you’re using a PMS program or a property management software program, we talk a lot about those on this channel. We personally use host away.

That does have a connection with booking.com, and so does the a hundred plus other PMS programs out there. But to the extent of how much is actually connected with booking.com, that’s going to depend on your property management software. So some of them have some pretty good connections. Some of them just have a calendar connection, for example, and so you’ll want to double check that.

But either way, you’re gonna need to create your listing on booking.com first, then connect it to your property management software.

Now if you’re not using a property management software platform, don’t worry. You can also use the IAL link that’s available in booking.com. What is an IAL link? This is basically a little link that you copy and you can paste in your other calendar, so you can paste it in your Airbnb or paste it in your VRBO calendar to make sure that anytime you get a booking from booking.com, it’s gonna show up on the other calendars preventing you from getting double bookings.

The third step to getting set up on booking.com is to set up your payments. Now, booking dot com’s much different than Airbnb. They don’t handle your payments for you necessarily. And I say necessarily because one of their newest features is payments by booking. Unfortunately, it’s not available to everyone using the platform, but our team is using it and I can say it is a huge help if you do have the option.

To find out if your property’s available for payments by booking, just sign into what they call their. Extra net. So this is the platform where you’re setting up your property. there’ll be a little finance link there. Click on that and see if you have the option. It’s not available in all countries, in all regions right now, but if it is available, it really helps out because they handle all the payments for you.

Just like booking.com, which means that you don’t have to set up a credit card to take that payment. and you also don’t have to worry about. Chargebacks. What is a chargeback? Well, chargeback is when you take a reservation using a credit card company. Most everyone in the industry is using Stripe, which handles these payments for you.

It can connect with your property management software platform. We’ll, we’ll get a little more detailed on that in just a second, but one of the problems with taking payments on your own is that if someone disagrees with something that happened at the property, or maybe they didn’t show up and they also weren’t able to get, a refund because of your cancellation policy, well, they might reach out to the credit card company and say, Hey, you know what, I never stayed at the property, or I canceled because of so, so and so, and I’m eligible for refund, but they wouldn’t give it to me.

And most often that credit card company is going to side with the guest. Which means they’re going to refund your reservation to that guest even if that guest stayed at your property. Now, I know that’s not an ideal situation. Luckily it doesn’t happen that much. Our teams managed over 50,000 guests in over 20 cities and lots of countries, and it’s a very, very small percentage of the time that it happens, and you also have the ability to fight it.

So of course you’re gonna wanna submit any evidence. You know, show your reservation, show the guest communication. if you have a video camera, you can show them actually checking in your property. So, not to say that you can’t win the chargebacks, but you do have to go through a bit of a process.

So if you’re eligible for booking.com by. So if you’re eligible for booking dot com’s payments, well I highly suggest you use it because it eliminates that whole piece of the puzzle. Now, as mentioned, if you’re not eligible, then you’re gonna want to set up Stripe. So you can take these payments automatically if you’re using a property management software platform, well, they make it really easy.

You can connect Stripe to your property management software , and then it’s already connected to the calendar, and so you can basically route that reservation to automatically take payment. And automatically take a deposit, which I highly, highly suggest because even though yes, they do have a damage policy, it’s not nearly as good as Airbnb’s resolutions or air cover.

And so by using Stripe, you’re basically going to place an authorization hold on that credit card. It’s only good for seven days though, so remember, if you have a guest that checks in and he is there for eight days, well, you need to charge it again on that eighth day.

So those are your options. You can either use booking dot com’s payment setup if you’re eligible. Or you can jump on Stripe, get that connected, and take payments yourself. That’s also gonna be the same tool that you’re gonna use to take direct bookings or take bookings through Google Vacation Rentals or Google Hotels if you’re set up on there.

So don’t think that by going through all this work, just set up on booking.com that it has to stop there. No, you’ll have access to these other channels as well.

Okay, let’s chat about some updates in 2025. One of ’em I hinted at there, and that is booking dot com’s damage program. And yes, this is not equivalent to Airbnb’s air cover. They do have a liability amount. They do have an amount that you can get reimbursed for.

You have to list it on your listing, and it depends on your property. It’s not the same amount for every property, but, but the downside is that. They do not guarantee any of these payments, and so it’s not that great of a program. I kind of feel like they just put it on there so that they could check that box.

They’re definitely trying to compete with Airbnb and these other platforms knowing that they’ve come more from the hotel side of things. They want to get as much market share as they can in the vacation rental space, and so they’re adding features. To make it easier for any of you out there that are not currently on the platform.

Couple of those we just mentioned, right? So payments by booking now a damage policy, and so I imagine that they’re just gonna get better and better or more similar to Airbnb or VRBO to make it easier for all of you to jump on the platform, which you absolutely should. I know that I get a lot of reservations from booking.com with my personal properties, and the good thing about that is that I’ve actually marked a lot of those up.

And so I’m earning more from booking.com than I am from the other platforms.

Also new in 2025 are some AI features, and so booking.com has the ability to put in FAQs for your property so you can put in answers to commonly asked questions, and their AI can automatically pull these answers to help you respond to guests.

Also new are there AI listing writing tools. So these are gonna be much, much more common. We know that Airbnb’s already automatically trying to, order your photos, which I would not do because if your photos are in the same order as everyone else’s. Well, you’re not gonna stand out as much. And so while some of these AI features might sound really great for creating your listing, they’re actually making you basically exactly like all the other listings, which means you’re not gonna stand out and that is the name of the game.

You need to stand out in order for someone to find your property, in order for someone to book your property.

Okay. Number five, let’s talk about a few tips, a few things that you need to do to make sure you’re boosting your visibility on booking.com.

One of those is that they actually have a visibility booster feature, so make sure you don’t miss that on your extra net. Check that out. They have a preferred partner program. This is similar to Airbnb’s, Superhost. Or VRBO perf, I think it’s Premier status or something like that. So again, they’re trying to be just like these other platforms to compete a little bit better.

Their review scores are out of 10 versus five, which personally, I think is a little bit better, right? It gives you a little more. Leeway. When you have a four star versus a five star, we know it’s a 20% difference in your review score versus a nine or a 10. Only a 10%, right? So as much as I think Airbnb should move that, it probably won’t.

So you have a little more flexibility with that on booking.com. And also if you’re running just a straight up vacation rental, it’s not an urban type property or it’s not a boutique hotel or something that’s. Often using booking.com more. Well, you have less competition on booking.com, and so I highly, highly suggest that you jump on there.

I think you’ll be really pleasantly surprised.

Another tip for listing in 2025 is to make sure that you have your guest policies in place. So one of the downsides with booking.com we’ve touched on is that their damage protection isn’t quite there, which means you have to be more careful accepting guests in your property. And one of the ways you can do that is by, yes, checking past reviews, but also making sure that you have a solid listing agreement in place and if you’d like a copy of ours, you can get our rules for free. There’s a link down below. These are rules we’ve developed again, after managing tens of thousands of guests. I think you’ll find them really helpful, and I think you’ll find some on there that you don’t currently have on your rules.

So check that out.

Aside from having a strong guest policy in place, a couple other steps that you can take to really protect your property or protect yourselves from having to deal with maybe some unwanted guests is to get a little more information from them.

So you’re gonna want to get a copy of their id. Remember, all hotels do this, right? Airbnb has their own sort of verification, but booking.com is not doing this. So make sure that you get a copy of their id. You can have ’em send it to you directly through the platform. We go one step further and we get a selfie from the guest checking, and that way we can match up the ID with the actual person to know that they are indeed who they say they are.

And remember, each additional step that you put in between your property and a potential guest lets the guest know that, hey, you’re serious. You’re not gonna allow anything crazy to go on at the property, that you care about the property and that you’re monitoring it. We don’t want to come off like we don’t want them to stay at our property, right?

But these are just standard procedures, and again, these are procedures that any hotel in the world is going to do.

So to recap real quick, in 2025, make sure that you have a strong guest policy, guest rental agreement in place. Make sure you’re getting a copy of their id. Ideally, you’re getting a selfie as well. Make sure that you get a deposit. It. And lastly, a quick, easy one is to make sure that you’re checking their reviews, which you weren’t always able to do.

Now you can.

number number six, let’s talk about a few mistakes to avoid on booking.com. The first one is just making sure that your calendar is synced up with your other calendars. So we talked about that I Cal Link. We also talked about if you’re set up on a property management software, well then this is gonna happen for you automatically, assuming you’re synced in with booking.com.

So make sure you’re not getting any double bookends.

The second thing you’re gonna wanna double check is that when you’re setting up your listing with booking.com, they have a lot of fields in there. I mean, they have a ton more than any other platform. They have hundreds and hundreds of amenities to choose from. But they have them in there for a reason.

And so remember, you only have to set up your primary property details one time. So as you go through this, make sure that you fill out all of those sections. They don’t have those sections there for no reason. They’re in there to provide more detail to the guests to help their algorithms pair your property with the right person.

And so, I don’t know with a hundred percent certainty, but I feel very confident that the more complete a listing is, the better visibility you’re going to have

Another quick tip, before you set up your cancellation policy on booking.com, do a quick scan of your neighborhood, of the market where your property’s listed, and see what cancellation policies. Other hosts, other owners are using, because if they’re all flexible and you’re super strict for 60 days, well that’s gonna deter quite a lot of people.

And so what we like to do is we like to look at an average, and of course the more data we have, the better that average is. but we like to go with the average cancellation policy.

Make sure that q and a feature that’s new is not left blank, so you have as much detail about your property in there. It’s gonna save your guests from having to ask these questions. It’s also gonna save you some time.

Make sure you have super high quality photos in there. And lastly, this seems like a no-brainer, but people just don’t do it enough. Make sure that you’re asking for reviews. Airbnb has a system to automatically ask for reviews. So does VRBO, so does booking.com, but they’re all different. They all ask varying amounts of times.

They all have different lengths where someone can actually review the property and so check their policy. Make sure that you’re asking for the review, especially with those guests that were communicating really well during the stay. But then they just went into silence afterwards.

They probably just got busy, right? And I’m sure they’d be happy to leave you review. You just have to remind ’em a few times.

So booking.com isn’t just another OTA. It’s one of the largest OTAs in the world with hundreds of millions of people Using that, which means it can bring a lot of reservations to your property. But you gotta make sure that you set it up right in the first place. I hope these tips helped you out a little bit.

If you’re finding value in the channel, I’d really appreciate if you’d just leave a, like consider subscribing. We have tons of other content on other OTAs on pricing. Basically anything that has to do with running. Your short term rental or your boutique hotel. Our team’s been doing this for over a decade.

We have a lot of experience and we’d also love to work with you. If you don’t want to do all this yourself, you can just head over to st riches.com. There’s a little property management button there, or team would love to chat with you. See what we can do to help you out and until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.