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I ran my holiday apartment through booking.com for 18 months, until a week or so ago - 95% of my business comes via Airbnb so the additional channel just didn’t

I ran my holiday apartment through booking.com for 18 months, until a week or so ago - 95% of my business comes via Airbnb so the additional channel just didn’t make sense. One thing I can tell you is that the “x guests booked” absolutely isn’t true, as it would frequently say so about my apartment when I hadn’t had a booking in months. Maybe it’s true in some cases, but there’s definitely some fudging going on.

pmjordan 7y ago
Giving them the benefit of the doubt here - could they have been counting you blocking off dates for bookings made through other channels?
AnssiH 7y ago
> One thing I can tell you is that the “x guests booked” absolutely isn’t true, as it would frequently say so about my apartment when I hadn’t had a booking in months. Did it specifically say "X guests booked at this specific apartment/hotel"? Not explicitly specifying the place would seem like an easy way to have a technically correct statement, while being extremely misleading. E.g. maybe it just meant bookings in the same city, despite showing that text beside your apartment.
Lucadg 7y ago
It could make sense because you are at constant risk of deplatforming and having a second provider is a backup plan. Unfortunately it's really rare to be able to get bookings from two platforms in a balanced way. I'm still trying to understand why. Any ideas?
- madaxe_again 7y ago
  Channel imbalance is inevitable without conscious and active management to prevent it. I used to run an ecommerce platform, and saw the innards of a lot of merchants. In a nutshell, a winning channel will see snowballing resource investment, and a losing one will be starved. You can force parity, but it usually comes at the cost of overall volume. Boils down to risk mgmt vs revenue - and all but the most conservative businesses will choose revenue. In my case, I absolutely starved booking in favour of Airbnb, as Airbnb was much faster out of the gate. So, I have platform risk, but revenue is good.
  - Lucadg 7y ago
    How did you starve Booking? Didn'it just happen? My point is that in this market it's really hard to attain channel balance. It seems the OTAs alghoritms absolutely favour cannibalization.
    - madaxe_again 7y ago
      I didn’t actively manage pricing, which I do on Airbnb - and had to charge a lot more on booking for the same revenue, as their commissions are fairly astronomical, if you want to feature anywhere other than the last page of search.

pmjordan 7y ago

Giving them the benefit of the doubt here - could they have been counting you blocking off dates for bookings made through other channels?

AnssiH 7y ago

> One thing I can tell you is that the “x guests booked” absolutely isn’t true, as it would frequently say so about my apartment when I hadn’t had a booking in months. Did it specifically say "X guests booked at this specific apartment/hotel"? Not explicitly specifying the place would seem like an easy way to have a technically correct statement, while being extremely misleading. E.g. maybe it just meant bookings in the same city, despite showing that text beside your apartment.

Lucadg 7y ago

It could make sense because you are at constant risk of deplatforming and having a second provider is a backup plan. Unfortunately it's really rare to be able to get bookings from two platforms in a balanced way. I'm still trying to understand why. Any ideas?

madaxe_again 7y ago
Channel imbalance is inevitable without conscious and active management to prevent it. I used to run an ecommerce platform, and saw the innards of a lot of merchants. In a nutshell, a winning channel will see snowballing resource investment, and a losing one will be starved. You can force parity, but it usually comes at the cost of overall volume. Boils down to risk mgmt vs revenue - and all but the most conservative businesses will choose revenue. In my case, I absolutely starved booking in favour of Airbnb, as Airbnb was much faster out of the gate. So, I have platform risk, but revenue is good.
- Lucadg 7y ago
  How did you starve Booking? Didn'it just happen? My point is that in this market it's really hard to attain channel balance. It seems the OTAs alghoritms absolutely favour cannibalization.
  - madaxe_again 7y ago
    I didn’t actively manage pricing, which I do on Airbnb - and had to charge a lot more on booking for the same revenue, as their commissions are fairly astronomical, if you want to feature anywhere other than the last page of search.