Booking.com Pros and Cons – Host Tools

It’s no secret that Booking.com is one of the giants of the short-term rental market. With more than 400 million monthly visitors, Booking is a titan of the industry. What does that mean for short-term rental hosts like yourself? As with anything, there are benefits and challenges. This blog post will cover the specific Booking.com pros and cons you need to think about when listing your home on their platform.

Host Tools provides an automated, unified calendar for short-term rental hosts, allowing you to seamlessly list on all major channels. Start your free trial today!

What is Booking.com?

If you don’t already know, Booking.com is a platform that allows travelers to browse and book hotels, apartments, short-term rentals, flights, car rental services, and more. It’s an all-in-one platform for travel. As a host, you can choose to list your property on Booking.com.

With so many monthly visitors, it may seem like a no-brainer to list your home on Booking.com. That said, there are a variety of pros and cons you still should consider. We’ll dive into those below.

Pros

• As mentioned earlier, there are more than 400 million monthly visitors to the site. That’s a lot. Your listing has the opportunity to be seen by many, many eyes when optimized well.
• With so many visitors, your property is being seen by a more diverse profile of travelers. For US properties, a lot of international traffic uses Booking.com.
• Last-minute travelers tend to use Booking.com.
• Some users have found that Booking,com is a good platform for newer listings trying to build up their review portfolio.
• Booking.com is a trusted brand, so it can be a good starting point for newer hosts.

Cons

• You may pay more in commission fees than platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo. This is especially true if you don’t already have a direct booking website where you can accept fee-free bookings.
• Unfortunately, there is less of a screening process for guests on Booking.com. While it can be nice for a faster booking process, not screening guests has its hazards.
• In general, the host dashboard is less user-friendly than channel managers like Host Tools.

Should I list my home on Booking.com?

Typically, yes. Utilizing a multi-channel distribution strategy for running your business is the best option. This means listing your home on as many platforms as possible, such as Airbnb, Vrbo, and your own direct booking website. Of course, this can be chaos without the proper property management software. Host Tools serves as your all-in-one hosting dashboard so that all of your bookings sync across all platforms. This means you never need to worry about double bookings.

Final thoughts

After you balance out the pros and cons of Booking.com, you’re going to want to list your home on the site. The more opportunities there are for people to see your listing, the higher the chances you have of keeping your calendar full with bookings.

Host Tools provides an automated, unified calendar for short-term rental hosts, allowing you to seamlessly list on all major channels. Start your free trial today!