Offer a choice of Booking.com payment models during the initial registration process.
Hostfully does not currently offer a choice of Booking.com payment models during the initial registration process. When a property is pushed directly from Hostfully, Booking.com appears to create it using the hybrid payment model by default.
Under this model, although the property is enrolled in Booking.com Payments, Booking.com pays PM the full guest payment and then invoices the PM separately for their commission.
This has accounting and VAT implications. Because the full guest payment passes through our business, we effectively receive 100% of the booking revenue before paying Booking.com's commission back. This means we're accounting for VAT on the full income, even though part of that income is subsequently returned to Booking.com as commission.
It also creates a much clunkier finance process, as accounts have to reconcile separate Booking.com commission invoices instead of simply receiving the guest payment net of commission.
The workaround is to create the shell listings in BDC first, then connect the properties to Hostfully.
This keeps the property remaining on the exclusive model, where Booking.com simply remits the guest payment minus their commission, which is much cleaner from both an accounting and VAT perspective.
It would be a great improvement if Hostfully could present users with the available Booking.com payment model options during the initial property creation flow, rather than defaulting to the hybrid model. That would eliminate the need for the workaround of creating the property in BDC first simply to obtain the correct payment configuration before connecting it back to Hostfully.
Kana Gordon
shared this idea
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Kyle Geri
commented
This is crucial to our business. We would love to see this option.