Feedback for the booking sites

Suggestions:

Hostelbookers
• Estimated Arrival Time to be a compulsory field (very useful for hostels with 8am to 8pm receptions)

• Expriy date of the credit card to be shown with the initial booking confirmation (so we know that the card is still valid by the arrival date or can otherwise address the issue well in advance)

• Appointing a specific Hostelbookers liaison (buddy) to our hostel and the contact details for the manager if a problem arises that needs to be taken further. (Should we have a problem of query, we can only send an email to the generic [email protected] which gets answered by a random person rather than by a person that we can establish rapport with)

• Ability to delete reviews or make them invisible or at least the contact details of a person who we can contact to address a vendetta review to.

• Put an explanation into place that the 10% deposit is non-refundable and paid for this booking only. i.e.: if guests want to change, shorten, delay or cancel the booking, then they have lost that deposit. It also would be fair to mention that HB keeps the deposit as their commission and we don’t get this here at the hostel, so that guests know that.

• No Shows, thrown out guests and cancelled bookings should not have the right to leave a review (as they have not actually seen our property and therefore can not form an opinion on things like security, maintenance etc.)

• Low rating should have the same weighting in the overall survey results than high ratings! (i.e.: you have an overall rating of 85% and after the next rating comes in at 42% your overall rating drops to say 80%. It will take the next 8-10 high (in the 90's) ratings to get back to the original overall 85% when it only took ONE rating to fall several percentage points. How can that be fair, especially, since we all know that often when we do receive a poor review rating we either didn't know about a problem (that most likely otherwise could have been resolved easily) or it was a problem outside our control (i.e.: people don't do their dishes, a drunk person throwing up in the dorm etc). Why does the hostel have to suffer such a large loss in reputation (in %rating) when it otherwise is a great hostel?

Hostelworld
• No Shows, thrown out guests and cancelled bookings should not have the right to leave a review (as they have not actually seen our property and therefore can not form an opinion on things like security, maintenance etc.)

• Low rating should have the same weighting in the overall survey results than high ratings! (i.e.: you have an overall rating of 85% and after the next rating comes in at 42% your overall rating drops to say 80%. It will take the next 8-10 high (in the 90's) ratings to get back to the original overall 85% when it only took ONE rating to fall several percentage points. How can that be fair, especially, since we all know that often when we do receive a poor review rating we either didn't know about a problem (that most likely otherwise could have been resolved easily) or it was a problem outside our control (i.e.: people don't do their dishes, a drunk person throwing up in the dorm etc). Why does the hostel have to suffer such a large loss in reputation (in %rating) when it otherwise is a great hostel?

• Put an explanation into place that the 10% deposit is non-refundable and paid for this booking only. i.e.: if guests want to change, shorten, delay or cancel the booking, then they have lost that deposit. It also would be fair to mention that the deposit is kept by HW as their commission and we here at the hostel don’t get this money, so that guests know that.

• Would be really good to be able to use Siteminder or other Channel Manager

• Incorporate the 'Things to Note' section into the actual booking process page where people have to tick a box that they have read the 'Things to Note' (which contains our cancellation policy and reception hours etc.)

• Put an explanation into place that the 10% deposit is non-refundable and paid for this booking only. i.e.: if guests want to change, shorten, delay or cancel the booking, then they have lost that deposit.

Booking.com
• Most bookings we receive through Booking.com, have incorrect credit card details. Perhaps they could upgrade to a system that actually checks the credit cards at the time of booking.

• Estimated Arrival Time to be a compulsory field (very useful for hostels with 8am to 8pm receptions)

Agoda.com
• They advertise our prices as heavily reduced prices, so much so, that in fact we NEVER had the high prices they show on their website as our rack rate! Result: guest assuming they have made massive savings but those guests are highly disappointed when they get here because what we offer doesn't warrant a several hundred dollar price tag. Trouble is, that the guests think, we usually charge several hundred dollars for dorm beds.... (Yeah, I know and wish we could....)

WotIf.com
• Please get them to send us the money they hold in trust for us without us having to invoice them! Their invoicing process is atrocious!

• WotIf doesn't supply email addresses to us operators. They say for privacy law but the actual person booking through them doesn't know that we don't get the contact details. Result: they blame us for not contacting them when we should have (and not could have!). So, on my wish list here is to supply us with the appropriate information so that we can do our job properly here.

Other comments:
Sorry, I suppose it did get a little bitchy after all though I seriously believe all of the above could make our job here at the hostels so much easier and would be helpful to any operator.

Thanks for reading and thanks for taking on the task to make the OTA's aware of suggestions for improvement. I have individually addressed those matters but as usual, the 'bargaining power' of one operator is limited.