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Can my account be transferred without my agreement?

I am an owner of a small company renting a number of properties. For each of the properties I set up Booking.com accounts and do my best to get the best reviews and scores - for all of them they range between 9.7 and 9.9 in Booking.com. One of my partners (owner of one of the properties) decided to try renting the apartment on his own. He asked Booking.com to transfer all reviews (in this situation we are talking 33 reviews with average score of 9.8) to his newly opened account. Even when I protested local representative of Booking.com agreed to the transfer.

Now I am thinking of all Booking.com partners in the area who have to start their accounts from the beginning and work hard to get good reviews and high scores. For months or years the mentioned owner will get unfair advantage over them.

Now let's think of Booking.com guests who will chose 9.8 apartment and might be surprised that the service is not as good as in the reviews.

My question is if it was right practice of local Booking.com representative to transfer reviews and scores without agreement of person who started property account from scratch and if such an action is fair to other Booking.com partners and guests.

Please help and let me know if you heard of a similar issue.

 


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Thuild - Your … 5 years ago

Dear Biuro,

Of course he can, because he is the owner of the property, not you. You're just a management company, thus reviews are for the property, not your company.

I also have properties under me and when I do ownership change on the accounts, I also get all the reviews they had before (most cases worse than what I would like). The reviews are for the property, so if I want to increase the score, I will need to build over what the property already has, which can make things difficult.

It wouldn't be fair to delete all reviews after each ownership change, because people can use this as a loophole to get rid of bad ratings by simply doing this process.

Hope that clarifies your case.

Zsolt - www.thuild.com

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Hakkas Hk 5 years ago

Hi Zsolt,

We are from Hong Kong and we face the same situation. Can you share your experience with us?

I would like to confirm, if you have done change of ownership, and that the account is passed from the existing owner to you (new owner), can you carry forward the comments?

We are in doubt because Hong Kong office says we cannot. Rather, the existing owner is entitled to carry the comments (describing the current property) to his new property (which location and rooms are all different). We are therefore very confused. May we have your sharing of experience on that? Thanks.

Greetings from Hong Kong.

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Thuild - Your … 5 years ago

Dear Hakkas,

When I did that, last summer, the property that transferred to my group had the reviews still attached to the account, after the ownership change was submitted.

Now, I also have a property which didn't have any reviews and after the ownership transfer, they got a few under my management.

But for sure it's illogical and straight stupid to carry reviews of property A onto property B if the owner is the same, I call b******* on this because it's plain wrong. You review the property A, not B so why would property B have property A reviews??

Anyway, I suggest you ask again and again until they explain it better.

Anyway, even if the new account owner will need to start over with the reviews, it would be fair, rather than carrying it on. But looking at it from a property-account standpoint, only the user/manager changes, not the property.

Best regards,

Zsolt - www.thuild.com

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Hakkas Hk 5 years ago

Dear Zsolt,

Thanks for your response! Exactly!
In fact I saw comments saying that guests went there and were taken to another place, and guest complains that the rooms are completely not what they saw from the description, and they blamed booking.com for posting "fake" comments, casting doubts on its credibility.

We are not sure about this but Hong Kong booking.com office said the Amsterdam booking.com policy is that once owner is changed (person who signed the contract) , previous comments must be removed. We will check to find out, anyway, thanks so much for sharing with us.

Hong Kong