Settings and activity
8 results found
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7 votes
We are scoping out the effort to set booking lead time separately for Booking.com.
An error occurred while saving the comment Robert Voccola supported this idea ·
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7 votes
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4 votes
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5 votes
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19 votes
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30 votes
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7 votes
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34 votes
Allow for custom booking lead time setting on a per channel basis.
BDC is a wide-open field for fraud. I've been a host for 5 years and learned early on that if you allow last-minute, same-day reservations on BDC, you're opening your business up to be targeted by people who have stolen others identities and credit cards.
So long as I can have a booking window of 5-7 days or more and use BDCs payment processing, I can mitigate the threat.
But, not having differentiated booking windows kills booking volume from other channels.
Having come to hostfully rather recently, I'm experiencing this issue again in a massive way.
In the last 8 weeks, 60% of our bookings from BDC have been fraudulent. Luckily we've caught most of them before check-in, but as you know you can not immediately reject and remove a reservation.
If it is same day, you have to wait 1-2 hours. If it's more than one day, you have to wait 24 hours.
Our calendar being blocked with fraudulent activity is KILLING us.
It removes availability and is a complete time suck as my staff is busy trying to verify identities, payment cards, and ownership
Likewise, the ones that got through and stayed trashed our rentals (it's happened more than once) to the tune of thousands of dollars.
And what's more, we've now had 4 charges challenged -- another $5k.
In this timeframe, damages to our business is close to $10k or more between damages, chargebacks, and lost revenue on calendar blocks.
Why do I share all this? The number one mitigating factor we've found is booking lead time. Fraudsters book almost exclusively inside a 24 hour window.
For now we've closed the connection between this location, BDC, and hostfully. It's a shame because legit BDC guests pay roughly 20-30% more over sources like Airbnb.
I hope this is a quick fix because we can't have lack of flexibility in our PMP restricting us from using any channel, let alone the most profitable one.
Feeling exhausted and defeated. I hope this helps move things along.