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Small properties, problems competing with new booking.com system

Hi everyone, I am running a very small boutique property and am finding it a little difficult working within booking.com. Why I say this is because I am getting regular bookings with Booking.com however the percentages overall seem to be not sufficient for the program that Booking.com likes. I am in the preferred partner program and they keep threatening to kick me off because of my preformance score. I have only one room to rent and it is being rented about half the weeends in any one month. I have perfect scores from my reviews. This does not seem to be enough for the program. My score moves up whenever I am booked, however whenever I am vacant my score plummets to the bottom. I am frustrated and have not been able to figure out what to do! Anyone have any experience with this? Please help me!


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Leandri Klopper 5 years ago

Hi there!

Thanks for asking. I've been thinking about this for a while as well.

I don't think it has to do with the size of the property as one of my properties is quite large (164 lodges and two apartment blocks round about) and I'm struggling to get Onto the Preferred Partner program. The only hurdle is the Performance section. Now I'm quite sure it has more to do with how you Manage it on Booking.com instead of how many bookings you get from Booking.com's platform. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but the Performance is based on how many units stand Open versus how many units have been booked? Right?

So what I've been playing with is, closing rooms a week in advance on Booking.com (they are being advertised on several other platforms as well so this doesn't influence the bookings much). This way Booking.com doesn't note them as Standing open (eg. not sold) they will mark itas unavailable. It looks better that it says Sold out, instead of Open with 4 units available.

Does this make sense? Do you think that has any influence?