Lay My Hat

we used to get most of our bookings from them but after they changed their business model and added more charges the bookings dried up. We still list on a commission basis and get one or two bookings per year, really not worth the effort.

We have stuck with a 3 night minimum but now get very few ABNB bookings, but do get many with Booking.com. I think there is probably more demand for 2 night bookings, particularly for a city break (not sure how close to Stratford you are). Our issue with 2 night breaks is for a weekend Friday Saturd...

Hi Newtimber,

There has been a lot of discussion about that rule being applied by booking.com. The other tack is to offer a very slightly different offer, that could just be the amount of deposit or other terms.

I would agree with Greenbarn, profitability is the key measure. In the winter we would rather have a smaller number of short breaks at decent rates as we are not heating it as much. This has to be balanced with the turn around costs. We take some longer bookings out of season but I agree the wear an...

We are still on both but get very few bookings, AirBnB is a bit hit an miss but we do well on Booking.com for shorter breaks out of season. It is a pain managing many sites but the market changes so much I don't think there is a choice. We also drive quiet a lot of booking via Facebook.

We went through this a few years ago. We renamed the original site to one that applied across both properties, that way you should keep all of your likes

I can't see any down sides, you should be paying for commercial waste collection either way so it should be cheaper as long as the SBBR continues to apply.

Who said that? I think I checked with my insurance company and it was OK, there are different levels of keysafe. We use this very robust model.

https://keysafe.co.uk/c500-keysafe.html

We are also getting an increasing number of bookings from Facebook but it is hard work. For us it has filled the gap where we used to get TA and OD bookings.

I can see that running such a large property is going to be quite different to our 2 and 3 bed. We get quite a lot via Facebook these days, its hard work and can waste a lot of time but I think it saved us this year. There may even be some groups specific to large accommodation, worth investigating....

Hi KarenP I am not sure of a book, most of the OTA like TripAdvisor, Owners direct have some good sections like this to help owners. and i am sure you will get lots of advice here. I think the initial answer will be way more than you think! That is particularly for bed linen, we found we needed at l...

Hi CSE I should have worded that better, we refused it for a number of reasons as they were likely to be over occupancy, the property also was not ready. My point was that the implications of you not taking or having to cancel a booking are a lot worse that other OTA. With most you will still pay th...

Sorry for the late response. We went through this with the revaluation a year or two back. We scraped in under the property value limit by about £50 so managed to retain SBBR on one of the properties and pay the standard rate on the other. Like you this could have hit us for an increase of over £2k ...

Do you take payment via b.com? We take payment ourselves so they have to complete our online booking form and make payment immediately after placing the booking with b.com. This can be a pain as they have already given a card number to b.com so does cause some confusion at times but has worked overall

Hi Chris The market is changing, driven by sites like booking.com and Airbnb where it is difficult to communicate with your guests before they book. Almost all sites are driving to an instant book policy. We used to want to vet our guests as much we could and resisted the newer listing sites. We got...