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Receive email address through XML from Booking.com

Hostel Reviews, Booking Engines, and Directories

Yaron Burgin started this discussion 12 years 7 months ago

Hi everyone.
Booking.com is one of the most important booking engines these days.
We are connected to them, and to all other booking engines, through a channel manager. Meaning we get all the information about reservations directly to out PMS through XML.
Last week, booking.com decided to stop sending the email address of customers through XML. So now we have to check each booking in the their back office and manually copy the email address to our system. This is weird, annoying and wasting a lot of time for our reception team.
The whole point of using a channel manager is to refrain from working on each engines' back office system.

We already approached Booking.com about this but got no reasonable response.
I think this is something that many hostels should approach them and let them know it's a stupid decision.
What do you think? Is it the same for you?

Thanks

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Rucksack Brian

12 years

They have never been very responsive to any of my requests either, except then they’re feeling argumentative - even when it’s something as small as changing an inaccurate property description. I don’t receive any information from them via XML, so I haven’t felt a change.

I read that they recently made some changes to their policies, and not everyone is very happy about it. Georges Panayotis from MKG Group wrote a negative article about them called Booking.com Reveal their true face.

Booking.com profits from their dominant position by imposing new rules on the game. To the surprise of its "partners", the site now reserves the right to automatically resell a room that one of its customers has canceled, so as not to lose commission. They block access to the customer's bank information, so that the hotel cannot claim the forfeit for no-show. They eliminate the transmission of e-mail addresses of their customers, a ridiculous practice to avoid direct contact between the hotel and the customer. This does not characterize a relationship of trust between business partners.

Are the changes you’re having trouble with because of this too?

Are the hotels getting their information via XML as well? Booking is primarily a hotel booking site. The hotels’ voices ring a lot louder than ours do when they scream because there are more of them out there and they have more money behind them. If you’re inconvenienced by this, surely they are too. The question is, does Booking.com care?

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byron

12 years

Brian excellent article - thanks for bringing it to our attention.
Now that Booking.com stopped also to send the CVV and we can't charge no-shows, we seriously consider to stop working with them.
I think all hostels should raise their voice against these one sided actions of the booking engines. Now it's booking.com but other engines behave the same way when they are strong.

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Ria

12 years

they pursued us for months and months and i was finally going to give in but now no way. they charge more than everyone else, expect us to send a bill to be paid, make cancellations our burden to prove and now you can't charge for a no show and can't contact the guest...this is bullshit.

i feel like calling their rep and saying i was about to cave and then read this article...

why should i sign up with someone who makes us work harder for our $$...i could just give more beds to STA if i wanted to work harder...

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HostelOffice

12 years

Booking.com can deliver a heap of bookings to hostels. But it depends on your city. Then some hostels just want to link with every agent possible. I have to highlight to those already full hostels and being pushed by Booking.com to join them that the only beds they could sell via Booking.com would be beds they have already been selling direct at zero commission or to other agents at 10% commission. Of course some managers don't mind that as they do not get measured and rewarded on the profit of the hostel. So probably the new increased admin hassle will cause only those hostels needing more bookings to list with Booking.com.

It depends on the location. If you google 'Hotel cityname' and 'hostel cityname' then you will gain an understanding of how relevant Booking.com will be to your hostel.

We have asked all our users integrated with Booking.com to inform their BC contact person that it is less secure to have to provide all staff with the Booking.com backoffice login details to gain basic email information so they would like the auto sending of the address restored. It will come down to a collective effort to get Booking.com to revert.

If things with BC stay the way there are then we will be suggesting a number of options to our users.

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Ria

12 years

I agree completely with the assessment that for some hostels it's only giving money away. That's why i've not added it up to now. But with increased competition, i have been considering it....but i'm not keen on all these restrictions and extra work. We like our guests to get a confirmation letter from us, plus a pre-arrival letter...without the email address that will be impossible to assure that our guests have the best possible information they need.

I hope people who are listed do make a point of protesting what seems to be a strong-arm action and poor thinking...

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HostelOffice

12 years

I think much of what we often experience in the Hostel industry is leading edge for the internet. As an example - Ratings and reviews are now standard for many things we buy online but were long ago very much standardised for hostel bookings even before they were standard for hotel reservations. So I think what we are now witnessing with Booking.com is their being challenged by the concept of who's guest it is.

Booking.com does not appear to have determined a point of departure when the guest becomes primarily the responsibility of the hostel. Because the guest is seen by Booking.com as a person they want to retain for future business they seem to be wanting to keep 100% control over the guest all the time. You can see that this attitude by Booking.com actively undermines the security of the guest by making it more difficult for a hostel to communicate with the guest for the benefit of their security and ease of travel.

Really all that Booking.com needs to do is add a line in their contract that requires the hostel to not use the guest's email address for purposes other than those that assist Booking.com to deliver a professional secure booking to the guest. Or words to that affect?

For as long as we in the hostel industry do not collaborate to write standards that we agree to enforce and promote. Then we will remain in a position of having no voice and continue to have terms dictated to us by companies primarily motivated by profit. If we have a hostel culture we want to protect then probably it is time to more formally organise ourselves?

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