Well, if you’ve been listening on 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 want to be where you stay tuned.

Welcome to short-term rental riches will 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 talked 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 more occupancy. And the more OTAs we have our properties on, hopefully, the more occupancy we have. And so, Tas and online travel agency. Booking.com, just happens to be the largest one in the world. Their 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 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 Can dot-coms website, 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. 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 them create new listing button and they’ll just walk you through. They need to know all the features of your property will need to upload photos and descriptions. We have plenty of podcasts in the past about these topics takes.

So, if you haven’t seen our website yet, Strriches.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 going to need more properties. And so, they want to make that as easy as possible, and they’re also doing some other things to compete with Airbnb. There are Helpful for us as owners.

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 host away. 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 host wave, 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 their first check to see if you can integrate. Directly with booking.com, if you’re just on Airbnb, just on VRBO we 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 and that is easy to do as well.

They have a sync feature. So, once your properties in there, you can just sink your two calendars together. They use, what they call, and I call, linked 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 their first of all, they do charge you a commission. So, they charge fifteen percent at least at the time of this recording.

Now, if you’re using a property, Management software. One of the nice things about it is that you can increase your prices for specific channel. So, you may want to increase your prices just for booking.com. So, you can do that by just adding a percentage increase, adjust 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 the booking.com would do for you but they do have that v’ger 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 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 Allow someone to book if their card is declined.

If someone doesn’t show up to your booking or they cancel, will 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 double check all that as well, because that’s going to line up with them. Taking your payments.

“We covered a lot of topics on this podcast and a quick action will bite size format. So, you have the tools to acquire and improve your short-term rentals on your own. But if you want to go deeper, I have a special invite for you. Join us once a month that are rested, investor Clubhouse, where we go in-depth on an individual topic, everything from analyzing properties to improving operations and our bottom line, we cover it all the clubhouse members and myself are sharing best practices to earn the most revenue with the least amount of headache and I would love to have you there as well. That’s restmethods.com forward slash Rich. Our lives are shaped by those. We spend the most time with. So, if you want to take your STR to the next level. Come join us. I hope to see you on the inside.”

One thing, you’re going to want to be very weary of though, if you decide to use book and dot-coms payment feature is that they’re not going to collect a deposit on your behalf. Want want? Want? 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’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. If you use booking.com, they’re not going to collect a deposit on your behalf, they do have a 300 dollar, I guess you could call it authorization where the guests agree to pay up to three hundred dollars 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 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 is 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, you’re 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. This recording it’s a three-day window to where we have more time to chat with the guests, to feel them out, to look at Past reviews, and make sure there’s nothing suspicious before we, let them into our property or 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 in 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.

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 guess that you might attract on booking.com. So, 75% of the nights booked us by guests, with five or more previous. These bookings that’s good news, right? You know, that they’re not bad guess or damaging properties.

68% of nights, booked us by families and couples.

So, if you have a property that set up more for families, well booking.com could help you out a little bit more 42% of nights book tour for properties, other than hotels. So, booking.com sort of started originally with hotels, and they’ve branched out over the last year’s with apartments and competing properties similar to Airbnb. So, A lot of their reservations now are coming from properties other than hotels.

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 guest 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 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 realized 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 lie 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. So, in the world, they are really trying to compete with Airbnb, so they are bringing in new features to make it easier for us as owners to put our properties on there. I do suggest that you get your property. See, on there. If you’re looking for any more exposure if your occupancy is down, remember that the type of guests coming from booking.com? It’s probably going to be a little different than what you’re used to might be and international guess, but at the end of the day if it helps boost your occupancy and they’re good. Guess helps. Boost your Revenue. I think it’s a wind. So, make sure you check it out. And 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 is going to take him more than maybe 30 minutes. So, check it out. Until the 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 what all starts with the properties you acquire. But you want to make sure that you acquired the right properties, I want to give you my e-book. 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 REST methods.com

RELATED PODCAST EPISODES

• Episode 130: 5 listing upgrades to boost your search ranking
• Episode 93: Should You Use This Tool? (Booking.com)
• Episode 50: The Secret to Accomplishing Anything (Special 50th Episode)
• Episode 22: Precautions for Accepting Guests Over 30 Days
• Episode 21: Money coming your way and Industry Updates