A couple of days back I mentioned about the booking.com site where I listed my property and I never expected that there would be scams as well over there. Thankfully I was notified in a very timely manner by some of the people I know who have been a victim of it and I took down my property completely. I have booked many hotels for my own stay via this portal, and it has always been a good success for me, so I never imagined that something like this would also be happening on the portal.
So, the day I put my home stay on their site, the same day I received a booking and I was super excited. The booking had no contact number or address, so I sent the customer a message asking to share the contact number for further updates. There was no response for 2 days, in the mean time I realized that this will become a problem in the future so I checked my settings and saw that I had missed to make the phone number mandatory. I changed the address and phone number details to be provided on mandatory basis. After that the next day I received one more booking, in that the address was there, but it looked a very vague address and then again the phone number was missing.
I was wondering how could the person move ahead without providing the phone number. That is where I started reaching out to some people who were already mentioning to me that something was not right here, I had not listened to them earlier but with this I thought I should listen to their story. Then I got the same story from 2 people who had put up similar home stays on their site, they too received such bookings with no contact details and they sent messages but no reply, finally it turned out to be a no-show and then booking.com charged them with the commission amount. They told me that it had happened with other people also they know.
So, in-short there are fictitious booking that happen and then there is a no-show, after which the owner has to pay the commission amount to booking.com. Then I thought if the phone number was mandatory, how could one still go ahead and complete the booking. I realized that it must be some one from inside, who could bypass the mandate.
I went ahead and cancelled both the bookings and then even delisted the property from their site. It is such a sad thing that such a reputed company has these kind of mal-practices. These must be happening only with home-stays kind of places where there is no credit -card payment. The hotels may not have these issues because they have mandatory credit-card payment requirement or entering the card details for security purpose. I do not regret that I had to take it down, the only sad thing I feel is that I put so many hours on it without any results.
Anyways, after this I opened an Insta page and through my own contacts I have been promoting it and it's been doing pretty well. I am getting real genuine bookings and queries now.
With this experience, I feel so disappointed with booking.com that I doubt I would ever want to book a hotel with them during my travels.
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