So long since we cancelled it not sure if its the same now ( we cancelled as they offer guests a further discount if they pay booking.com which affects rate parity with other agents plus they charge you the card commission) I suggest try going to the tab for Properties then polcies and see if the option to leave/decative the payment with booking.com is there
If I recall correctly when we deactivated it back in 2019 it was by doing this Go into the Booking.com extranet: Property > Policies > Guest Payment Options. Select “Edit”, and under the heading “Allowing guests to pay online”, select “No”
You can ask booking.com to add it in to your policy / description or you can set up a message template that automatically sends the same message that you have written to every guest when the booking is made. You do that via the messaging section. Or you can go to the property section then click on Policies then go down to Other Policies and see if you can do anything there, we deactivated pay online but the option is there and will allow us to reactivate it if we want. Or go to Cancellation and Prepayment Policies and click on create new policy then click on Create new then click Customised choose yes or no for cancellation options think you need to click yes , choose how many days etc before they can cancel , then choose amount of fee, then choose no show charge, then click on prepayment and click either after guest books or after free cancellation period ends. That way the guest knows you want full payment by a certain date and you cans end the messages on the template with how you want payment.
You could contact the guests via messaging and ask for payment to your PayPal account or bank account. We deactivated paying online as Booking.com started offering further discounts without our permission to encourage people to pay online which caused parity issues with other agents.
This sadly is a risk we all take with any booking , the best thing is if it is a Non Refundable booking from day 1 then charge the card the day you get the booking, if it is not a non refundable at that stage but is a large sum of money and blocking a lot of space during a busy time then preauthorise the card and add something to your terms and conditions shown online that you reserve the right to preauthorise the card .
One thing is that some less scrupulous people if they have booked an expensive stay and decide not to travel or find something cheaper will cancel their cards so you cannot charge, not everyone but some people do do such things
Booking.com wont do anything about it they deem the booking to be your responsibility the only time they contact or speak with hotels really is if guests complain or there are changes to a reservation that need to be confirmed by phone but they will not chase outstanding money from guests for you . So make sure you cancel the booking as a no show with booking.com so at least they will not charge you commission
To be quite honest if the cats are not in the house whats to stop another cats hair blowing in to any property they may be in if their window is open or as they walk along the street. Its silly to expect you could stop something blowing through the window, but to be honest just tell them you need to know when they are leaving and will charge for the nights stayed as there is no point in making them pay in full or stay as you will only get a bad review, and to be honest if they were meant to be cash on arrival one does wonder why they did not have their "bank affairs" sorted before travelling ?
Did they get any discount for a long stay if so I would scrap that and charge the normal rate per night for a short stay
re contacting booking.com they have made it a little more difficult these as they want us all to use their online message system which they then say they will get back to you within so many days but they do still have phones but it takes a search to find them
Just seen this is now every cancellation they are doing this with, cancel it online but not with the hotel. This just caused an issue as a guest called to check their cancellation and rightly the reception told them it wasn't cancelled as as far as they could see it was still on our system. have booking.com thought this through as if they do not send the cancellation through then we still have it on our PMS. the only way to find out the true status of a booking now is to log in to booking.com every time to check the actual booking page
As I said on another thread on this , you can't remove it, they are not telling hotels they have just added it . They are checking around and if they find a cheaper rate they take it an call it booking. basic, the things is with us 99% of the time its a rate from their sister company Agoda who are publishing a member only price that you should sign in for but ignoring the rules and publishing it publicity instead, booking.com then take that rate and use it as they see it as a price discrepancy . They have also started offering some people discounts for paying them direct but they have not informed us of that
I see they have now gone back to the new procured with sperate screens which are making it impossible to work with a password manager, the whole point we use one is for extra secure password generation and storage, moving the extranet to this means that people will give up their password managers and just start using passwords they can remember easily which makes it less secure. Booking.com you are not making thigs more secure you are in fact doing the opposite
So long since we cancelled it not sure if its the same now ( we cancelled as they offer guests a further discount if they pay booking.com which affects rate parity with other agents plus they charge you the card commission) I suggest try going to the tab for Properties then polcies and see if the option to leave/decative the payment with booking.com is there
If I recall correctly when we deactivated it back in 2019 it was by doing this Go into the Booking.com extranet: Property > Policies > Guest Payment Options. Select “Edit”, and under the heading “Allowing guests to pay online”, select “No”
You can ask booking.com to add it in to your policy / description or you can set up a message template that automatically sends the same message that you have written to every guest when the booking is made. You do that via the messaging section. Or you can go to the property section then click on Policies then go down to Other Policies and see if you can do anything there, we deactivated pay online but the option is there and will allow us to reactivate it if we want. Or go to Cancellation and Prepayment Policies and click on create new policy then click on Create new then click Customised choose yes or no for cancellation options think you need to click yes , choose how many days etc before they can cancel , then choose amount of fee, then choose no show charge, then click on prepayment and click either after guest books or after free cancellation period ends. That way the guest knows you want full payment by a certain date and you cans end the messages on the template with how you want payment.
You could contact the guests via messaging and ask for payment to your PayPal account or bank account. We deactivated paying online as Booking.com started offering further discounts without our permission to encourage people to pay online which caused parity issues with other agents.
This sadly is a risk we all take with any booking , the best thing is if it is a Non Refundable booking from day 1 then charge the card the day you get the booking, if it is not a non refundable at that stage but is a large sum of money and blocking a lot of space during a busy time then preauthorise the card and add something to your terms and conditions shown online that you reserve the right to preauthorise the card .
One thing is that some less scrupulous people if they have booked an expensive stay and decide not to travel or find something cheaper will cancel their cards so you cannot charge, not everyone but some people do do such things
Booking.com wont do anything about it they deem the booking to be your responsibility the only time they contact or speak with hotels really is if guests complain or there are changes to a reservation that need to be confirmed by phone but they will not chase outstanding money from guests for you . So make sure you cancel the booking as a no show with booking.com so at least they will not charge you commission
To be quite honest if the cats are not in the house whats to stop another cats hair blowing in to any property they may be in if their window is open or as they walk along the street. Its silly to expect you could stop something blowing through the window, but to be honest just tell them you need to know when they are leaving and will charge for the nights stayed as there is no point in making them pay in full or stay as you will only get a bad review, and to be honest if they were meant to be cash on arrival one does wonder why they did not have their "bank affairs" sorted before travelling ?
Did they get any discount for a long stay if so I would scrap that and charge the normal rate per night for a short stay
re contacting booking.com they have made it a little more difficult these as they want us all to use their online message system which they then say they will get back to you within so many days but they do still have phones but it takes a search to find them
/en-gb/help/support-contact/where-you-can-reach-us
Just seen this is now every cancellation they are doing this with, cancel it online but not with the hotel. This just caused an issue as a guest called to check their cancellation and rightly the reception told them it wasn't cancelled as as far as they could see it was still on our system. have booking.com thought this through as if they do not send the cancellation through then we still have it on our PMS. the only way to find out the true status of a booking now is to log in to booking.com every time to check the actual booking page
As I said on another thread on this , you can't remove it, they are not telling hotels they have just added it . They are checking around and if they find a cheaper rate they take it an call it booking. basic, the things is with us 99% of the time its a rate from their sister company Agoda who are publishing a member only price that you should sign in for but ignoring the rules and publishing it publicity instead, booking.com then take that rate and use it as they see it as a price discrepancy . They have also started offering some people discounts for paying them direct but they have not informed us of that
I see they have now gone back to the new procured with sperate screens which are making it impossible to work with a password manager, the whole point we use one is for extra secure password generation and storage, moving the extranet to this means that people will give up their password managers and just start using passwords they can remember easily which makes it less secure. Booking.com you are not making thigs more secure you are in fact doing the opposite