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Do other Home/Apartment find it difficult to ensure a clear description of their property and what they offer due to the automated way the descriptions are made on Booking.com? Booking.com be quick to make changes and adapt to the Apartment market needs?

A major problem is with breakfast.

I place breakfast items in the apartment for my guests (bread, butter, jam, juice , teas and coffee), but when I select breakfast through Extranet on my description it appears as  "breakfast is served each morning at the property".

Some people find misleading as they are expecting to be served breakfast on a daily basis and there might understandably be certain complaints.

As an apartment owner and not a hotel, renting the apt in the so-called sharing-economy I cannot offer food service. I just offer breakfast items for my guests to make them feel like home and it is a selling point that I feel has to be on my listing.

I feel there should be some quick changes by Booking.com to adapt to the Home/Apartment market it recently entered to ensure they are represented accurately on their website for the everyone's benefit (guests, apartment owners and booking.com)

 

P.S: I also have my concerns with the main description as Booking.com is not  allowing you to choose the information that you feel are the selling points of your listing! At least in my case the main description mentions - the least to say - information of secondary importance and not the key selling points and loosing the opportunity to attract more bookings.

 

Any thoughts?


Profile picture for the user f
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fluff 5 years ago

Oh the main descriptions are dire!

It's taken me a year of nagging to get our one sort-of acceptable....ish.

I have a friend who has just listed on BDC and showed me his main description, it was way off and actually gave incorrect and misleading information, even mis-catagorising his property completely.

Whatever writer/algorithm they use it's pretty naff. The claim is that the most important parts of the data we provide (according to their data streams/stats) is highlighted using their "proven" catchy wording.

So where does the imaginary stuff come from?

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Delta16home 5 years ago

The point is that, I place breakfast items from the beginning of the stay, for my guests to have this for every single day of their stay (depending on how much they eat - I place a reasonable amount of bread, butter, jam and juice fro the days and amount of people)

The problem is that guests think that I will be serving them every day breakfast since on the description it says "breakfast is served each morning at the property". What I do is to provide them with breakfast items for their whole stay. I do not cook, or prepare it or serve it to them.

I can just erase it from my listing, but then I am loosing a selling point that I want potential guests to know to attract more bookings! If I don't write that i offer breakfast items of course they will appreciate it when they see food waiting for them, but the point of a description is to SELL your product the best you can, represent it's value to attract more sales!

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fluff 5 years ago

A possible work around:-

Create another new room type

e.g. Room with breakfast basket Or Room and breakfast supplies

Then kill off the existing breakfast option.

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Joe's Lookout … 5 years ago

Delta16home - how about a picture of the breakfst basket in the room with a caption?