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Booking.com halts payments to hosts over IT technical maintenance
- Havoc 3y agoThat smells like a hack.
- benjaminwootton 3y agoCurious how they need a 10 day outage on the outbound payment side, but not the inbound payment side which must be significantly more complex!
- berbec 3y agoThis is some new definition of the word "need" that I am unaware of. Methinks a liquidity problem is the true culprit.
- spyke112 3y agoTo be fair, payment in is probably handled completely differently through a payment service provider as card payment, where as payment out probably is bank transfers, which I would imagine is not as easy.
- mschuster91 3y agoUnless they've been doing shit like paying for promotion discounts in a "snowball" pyramid scheme - which I don't believe - they should not have a liquidity problem, quite the contrary, as people pay weeks to months in advance. The interesting thing is... what's with the hosts who get into financial difficulties after 10 days of delayed payments. I get it that three years of a pandemic, the consequences of the Ruzzian war, and inflation have been a drain on everyone's reserves - but not even ten days of runway? Holy shit.
- fphhotchips 3y agoIt's not 10 days; it's (up to) almost a month: > payments for guests checking out from June 28 would be delayed and all paid out in one go on July 24. That said, it sounds like payments are normally delayed by 10 days from checkout. Of course, apparently some payments "could be delayed until August", so all I can say with authority is that this is a mess.
- mschuster91 3y agoOkay now that is an entirely different amount of mess (and completely unacceptable), still troubling to see businesses having such a low amount of runway. I mean, anything could drive them into disaster at that point, even an unrelated natural disaster cutting off the roads to the village or whatever.
- KidJhb 3y agoCame across this thread as I am owed well over 60 bed nights by BdotC. Say what you like about lack of runway, bear in mind that I bore all the costs for this accommodation upfront, some of it since May. Everything. If I had let those rooms out on another platform I would have been paid on check-in. Why are they robbing the little guys, what is going on with their cash flow? A switchover can happen overnight, with the right planning, there should be no need to delay payments by 3 months!
- zippercreatemy 3y ago100% has to be a liquidity issue. I am guessing that they invest the funds in trust in overnight markets and someone has had too many losses.
- sally1984 3y agoThey are sponsoring FIFA women's football world cup 2023. Definitely, not bankruptcy or liquidity issue.
- jsumrall 3y agoThat would be quite the story, as I have the impression that Booking is absurdly profitable.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's what they said about Van Moof, and plenty of other companies that ultimately went bankrupt. They had a pretty bad loss two quarters ago: "Net income was $266 million, compared with a net loss of $700 million in the prior-year quarter" https://s201.q4cdn.com/865305287/files/doc_financials/2023/q1/Q1-2023-BKNG-Earnings-Release.pdf https://s201.q4cdn.com/865305287/files/doc_financials/2023/q...
- sally1984 3y agopayments to hosts over IT techni... Please visit this group in FB which was created to register all the concerns from hosts and guests from all over the world. We can collectively work together to fix this situation. https://m.facebook.com/groups/1316864141779135/ https://m.facebook.com/groups/1316864141779135/
- wewilldieanyway 3y agoHahah, I wish. Booking stock is at an all-time-high at the moment, and we could have made very good money if they indeed had a liquidity problem. Poor tech + poor timing. Take off the tinfoil hats.
- arp242 3y agoWhile I lack direct first-person experience, I've heard some pretty harrowing tales about the state of booking.com's backend over the years from multiple independent sources, which makes me think that "technical reasons" is at least plausible. Also, from a quick search, Booking seems to be doing fine financially.
- delfinom 3y agoIf it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck
- mrweasel 3y agoSeems more or at least equally realistic that someone screwed up and now Booking.com won't admit that they are scrambling to fix something on the backend.
- jacquesm 3y agoScrambling implies something quick. This has been going on for too long to use that term.
- siva7 3y agoThey're setting their priorities straight.
- that_guy_iain 3y agoThey don't lose money if they slow down their payouts but they do lose money if they stop accepting money. Basically, they can just down outbound payments for 10 days and not really lose any business. For most places it's probably not going to be that much of a problem they need to wait 10 days for a payment. If you can do something and it makes your life easiler why not?
- danpalmer 3y agoWhy would the inbound be more complex? Inbound they're basically taking credit cards, and while they probably have a few card processors they use and some complexity around taking different cards via different processors in different countries, it's not too complex. Outbound, they're paying into bank accounts (more complex), in many different countries with different protocols for bank transfers, with significant reporting and auditing requirements, invoicing, etc. Also paying on different timescales for different things – whether bulk purchasing inventory, paying for on-demand bookings, etc. Payment terms will vary by many factors including who the payee is. Some payees like large chains may have their own accounting systems that need to be integrated with. I'd have generally assumed that outbound would be much more complex!
- ajhurliman 3y agoI believe it was sarcasm; of course they’ll continue collecting money and not paying people during maintenance, because who doesn’t want more money?
- benjaminwootton 3y agoIt was sarcasm but I still would hazard a guess that the public facing payments are harder than the backend payment runs. A few thoughts as a non expert: They might take thousands of bookings for a single hotel, so the volume of inbound payments is significantly more. Public facing payments have to operate 24/7. They have to deal with fraud and bad actors. Transactions need to be real time rather than batch. They need to support all kinds of international payments. They have to take payments over web, mobile and call centres. They have to support PCI and GDPR compliance on the customer side. I’m sure neither side is easy at their scale, but B2C sounds much trickier to me even though there are opportunities to outsource on both sides.
- newhotelowner 3y agoIn the USA, they pay hotels through prepaid credit cards. CC is attached to each reservation. And the hotel charges the card on the day guest arrives. It may be complex, but they only give hotels 5 days for reconciliation, and won't accept any changes after 5 days.
- jmuguy 3y agoBooking.com is pretty awful on the backend. For instance they would often have line items in a payment that weren’t attributed to any reservation. Which is a pain in the ass if your accounting system assumes all payments will always be associated with a reservation.
- gtirloni 3y agoAren't they a Perl shop? That shouldn't matter, people can make it rain with, say, TCL in some places, but it must be hard to find engineers if that's the case.
- wheresmycraisin 3y agoThey are Perl and no remote.
- delfinom 3y agoAmazing job security really for those that work there
- rootsudo 3y agoironic being a travel website.
- anaganisk 3y agoGoogle having a competitor for Zoom, FB once being so into meta, Apple promoting Vision pro as game changer yet none of them dogfood their own products, to integrate work from home. I guess building something is not the same as doing what works for them. Yeah, ironic, but that how businesses work, I think.
- scarface_74 3y agoIf you’re working for any of those companies even if you are in the office, more than likely you are working with people in other offices on your team. But then again, I have no idea about how colocated the teams at Apple and Google are.
- spyke112 3y agoI hate using these systems, hotels.com is another subpar example, at least as a customer, with only half working systems. It seems silly to me as a customer that the booking system, is also responsible for handling payments. I fully understand the lure of getting paid upfront, and the sociological impact on customers in regards to cancelling, but boy is it annoying me as a customer. I find it way easier to just pay at checkout, at the hotel. Now, not everyone is a hotel, and in those cases it might make sense. There, I'll turn of the grumpy old man now.
- username_my1 3y agoI think there is no issues in bundling software to provide a turn key solution, that way the customers can focus on their business, not the complexity that comes with digital solutions. with that being said, I'm pretty sure marketplace regulations (such as booking.com) forces the marketplace to be out of the money flow. so this should be on the PSP side, it's strange that booking.com is halting payments this way. another point is that they're collecting 4% interest on money that's not theirs ... I wonder if they plan on paying out the interest.
- jefozabuss 3y agoI use booking.com and I seem to pay about half the time at the hotels, so you can technically just pay at checkout at the hotel if you choose ones with that option.
- danpalmer 3y agoIt's actually a bit more complicated than this. It's not just about where you pay as a customer, it's also about the business model under which you're buying. If you pay Booking, it's quite possible that Booking are acting as a reseller and buying wholesale hotel rooms to then sell to you at a markup. In that case Booking are the merchant, and who is ultimately responsible for the service. If you pay the hotel, Booking may take a fee but it's essentially commission, the hotel is fully responsible for the service and are the merchant. None of this should really matter to the customer, but it does when things go wrong. Liability is different and consumer rights can be different if you're buying internationally or paying online vs in person.
- politelemon 3y agoIt looks very simple from that brief article. They hold the cards and can get away with it. I'd imagine they aren't so tolerant if the same hosts are delayed with their fees and payments.
- mulletbum 3y agoBooking.com let someone create an account with my email address, register a room in Russia, then charge 20k a night for it. I called them the minute I saw it happening, they said they would take care of it. I still have the booking and the amount owed on the account (which I password reset and took control of). So something is wrong with their system.
- romusha 3y agoIs there anyway to block your email to be registered into a website?
- mewmew07 3y agoemail addresses are strings, if the website where the registration is being made makes no effort to validate the email address is controlled by the user session registering it, how do you suppose to block it from happening?
- rolandog 3y agoNot that I know of; it's rather frustrating when you're constantly receiving some other person's correspondence (in spite of reaching out to them and asking them to update it). From airline tickets, to bank statements, to collection agencies, to McDonald's HR portal, to HomeDepot invoices. Plz make it stop...
- Waterluvian 3y agoThat’s really frustrating but what’s the intended angle here by the fraudsters? It’s just an email address.
- alex_duf 3y agois "IT Technical maintenance" poorly worded coms for "ransomware"? because that's what it looks like from here.
- jacquesm 3y agoOr simply a lack of operating cash and they use this to jump across the shortage hoping nobody will notice.
- HankB99 3y agoAm I the only one thinking that they are masking a cash flow problem? Unless H/W is failing it seems to me that an existing system could just keep rolling along. If there is a capacity problem throw more H/W at it. I suppose if the S/W is poorly designed some intervention would be required. I once worked at a shop that had years of transactions clogging up a database when daily information was critical and perhaps monthly would be useful for reports. As others have mentioned, incoming payments are processed but not outbound.
- jacquesm 3y agoNo, definitely not. The first and only time 24x7 missed a check payment and blamed their IT department was enough for me to start a 'plan B' and that ultimately saved the day. Of course their outward messaging was the everything was absolutely fine right up until the moment they were declared bankrupt. Likewise 'IBill' and a couple of other cases besides. Regardless of origin: if they really have IT issues that can cause this then you should find an alternative. Unfortunately the 3rd party booking sites are so few in number when it comes to volume that your options are very limited.
- dangus 3y agoWhy speculate when we can inspect their financial filings? https://ir.bookingholdings.com/financials/annual-reports/default.aspx https://ir.bookingholdings.com/financials/annual-reports/def... https://seekingalpha.com/article/4611920-booking-holdings-cautiously-optimistic https://seekingalpha.com/article/4611920-booking-holdings-ca... I see positive net income and a positive net change in cash and cash equivalents. “Net income for the quarter amounted to USD266 million, compared with a net loss of USD700 million the prior year quarter. Net income per diluted share was USD7 compared with a net loss of USD17.10 the same quarter a year earlier.” “For Q1 2023 (quarter ended March 2023), Booking Holdings reported revenues up 40% YoY on a reported basis (47% on a constant currency basis) to USD3.8 billion, on the back of a 44% YoY increase in gross travel bookings which amounted to USD39.4 billion for the quarter, and a 38% YoY increase in room nights booked. Booking's performance outpaced rival Expedia (EXPE) whose gross bookings rose 20% YoY to USD29.4 billion the same quarter.”
- oldtownroad 3y ago
- kurito 3y agoReminds me of VanMoof, whose messaging a week ago was: > We have temporarily paused sales to catch up on the production and delivery of existing orders. Rest assured – this has no effect on servicing. ... and then news broke that it's on the brink of bankruptcy.
- itronitron 3y ago>> temporarily paused sales I interpret that as... we have laid off the entire sales team
- wewilldieanyway 3y agoyeah, except Vanmoof is not even publicly traded while Booking has a $100B market cap on NASDAQ with 'profitable as fck' credit rating. just poor tech capabilities & timing. nothing deep here. (not a speculation.)
- csomar 3y agoMost people here are missing, what is in my opinion, the most probable reason: It doesn't affect their bottom line. If this was affecting guest checkout, it'll be resolved within hours with execs being all over it. But this affects outbound payments, same as if it was affecting refunds. There is no legal requirements here (with penalties) and hosts are hostage to the system. The alternatives are not much better (if not worse) due to the enshittification of the whole IT sector. Welcome to Web 4.0. I guess we'll be missing Web 3.0.
- mg 3y agoHow many independent hotel booking companies are there these days? I can only think of only 2: Booking Holdings and Expedia Group. Are there more?
- sally1984 3y agoPlease visit this group in FB which was created to register all the concerns from hosts and guests from all over the world. We can collectively work together to fix this situation. https://m.facebook.com/groups/1316864141779135/ https://m.facebook.com/groups/1316864141779135/
- ornornor 3y agoBooking and Expedia are the same company as mentioned in another comment here.
- mg 3y agoWhich post? I think this is a misunderstanding. Booking Holdings and Expedia Group are two different, publicly listed companies.
- raphman 3y agoThere's also e.g., HRS Group in Germany [1] - albeit much smaller with a revenue of about 200M €. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HRS_Group https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HRS_Group
- PedroBatista 3y agoI think delaying payment for almost a whole month is due to their extremely dominant position on the market and little to do with "IT technical maintenance". Pretty much every big system at a big company is a "pile of junk", but they had all the time, money and resources to improve it. They didn't, the question is: Would Booking.com act the same way if they were a small player in a market with a dozen big players?
- jollybilly 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- KidJhb 3y agoCame across this thread as I am owed well over 60 bed nights by BdotC. Say what you like about lack of runway, bear in mind that I bore all the costs for this accommodation upfront, some of it since May. Everything. If I had let those rooms out on another platform I would have been paid on check-in. Why are they robbing the little guys, what is going on with their cash flow? A switchover can happen overnight, with the right planning, there should be no need to delay payments by 3 months!
- mattbee 3y agoWhoa, yes. Nothing for 3 weeks. I'm owed £1900 so far. Their back-end systems must be horrendous - I've maintained an integration for years that works off their PDFs and they keep making little tweaks, adding lines here and there, renaming columns, adding odd lines that refer to charges they "forgot" to collect months before. I'm going to contact a few future bookings and say that booking.com have not been paying their bills, and to see if I can get them to rebook direct.
- TheHappyOddish 3y ago> They’re also displeased that Booking decided to do its maintenance now, in the busy summer season. The busy summer season... as half of the earths surface is in winter.
- CharlotteSymi 3y agoYou are definitely not the only one suspecting a financial problem in booking.com. I am a host in Greece and I am experiencing the delay regarding payouts from the company. I have complained but getting no qualified response. Very frustrating and worrying