Online Booking Systems

[Moira]

I contacted VIP with some questions, I thought I would share their response. Certainly helped clarify some of my issues. However using their Merchant Account makes me a bit nervous.

"1. Yes we do have terms and conditions. When you sign up immediately before you are allowed to progress beyond the first page you have to 'tick' that you agree to them.

2. You set your prices nightly and can, if you want, have a different price for every night of the year. You can also stipulate minimum booking periods. So, set it at one week and the system will not allow anyone to book less than that. When a booking is placed it is only provisional until you agree it. We send you notification and you can then do one of three things. Approve, reject or email the customer. SO, in effect you set nightly but cancharge weekly if you like.

3. The system allows you to discount in any way you require. You set up special offers via date and price in the admin area.

4. Currently you can't add in charges but we are working at creating a 'shopping basket' that the customer selects from to go with their villa holiday. You would then add in your 'products' and the customer gets to choose from them. This will be live in around four months time.

5. When you join you pay a single one off fee. You can then add as many properties as you like; each one has it's own calendar and admin update area for no additional cost.

6. All transactions go through our payment gateway. This is to ensure the highest levels of security and we know that to get a merchant account is very, very difficult for owners.

7. We are PCI accredited which means we have met all security standards required of us by the banking industry. All transactions go through a secure server and we do not retain any personal credit card information.

8. We submit the first booking payment to you when the guest arrives in resort. This is to ensure that we do not attract bogus properties; something which really affected the rental market last year. Major listing sites were caught up in this and a notable case was the Morairaway.com scandal. Literally hundreds of thousands of pounds were fraudulently obtained by this scam. After the first booking we will pay you 28 days earlier than the guest arrives (subject to the booking date and arrival date being more than this of course!). If you request this we will ask you for a range of documents to prove you own the property/have authority to be renting it out. This is nothing that a genuine owner cannot provide. We do not charge additional fees for this service.

9. Unfortunately we do not give out deposits prior to the final payment being paid. This is because at that stage there are to many 'if's'. What if you cancel, what currency do you want and how do we recover it if the rate has changed, what if the customer cancels, what about transfer charges etc, etc. It becomes too overly bureaucratic and cumbersome to manage hundreds of bookings in this way. By setting a single date everyone knows exactly where they stand.

We have a product that will save you hours in admin time. Our service is not just about securing you the payment. We manage the pre departure communications for you allowing you to relax knowing the final payment is being collected, your arrival instructions are being sent and when the customer is in your property an email is waiting for them back home to secure you valuable feedback.

We provide advertising on our main website and we are expanding our affiliate network. I know that we are only small in the listing arena but we have contracted the best SEO company in the UK to change this. Greenlight. Check them out and who they work with; I know you will see the ambition that we have. You will see the changes happening on the site over the next six to twelve months to improve our search engine positions and you will benefit from this by not only getting a full payment and rental management system but also advertising that brings in bookings."

[ccazes]

I do like the services offered by VIP except the obvious one, cash flow blockage from them keeping the cash until 28 days before arrival. It might work for some but I am looking for a system that gives me more control, not less no matter how efficient and honest they are.

[mmiksis]

I use aximize.com to manage my Seattle Vacation Rental. It supports online payments, bookings, and availability calendar. It integrates with PayPal and sends link within the invoice to pay. It lacks some of the nice CRM metrics and task list that PIMS does but it provides all the essentials.

[AMC]

Hey continuing on the VIPvillas.com theme.
I have just had confirmation from them, on the back of a communication that i received that they have recently secured a deal with a major insurer which will insure all bookings made through their booking system.

Hey it seems like i am advertising for them her, i think i will have to go back to them and ask for a commission.

No but really. I do use their system anyway but I think that this is a really major plus, after all the bad press coverage over the last 12 months re bogus properties etc. This surely would give customers confidence in booking with us if we could offer this benefit.

What do you think?

[victoriac]

I've been looking at VIPvillas and so far I am quite impressed. They also seem to answer emails very quickly which I like so I think I am going to go with them - will let you know how it goes!

[soldomus]

I currently use paypal when people want to pay by cc which is quite expensive and also does not solve the problem of accepting online bookings which I would like to start doing. For rental management I use PIMS which I am happy with. So I looked into http://vipvillas.com/ who seem happy to charge 2.6% only on the monies that go through the credit card (not the whole booking) and handle online bookings. This is less than paypal. Has anyone used vipvillas and what is the consensus on this? Thanks

[pazzarit]

I have finally find a really good online booking system. This is Supercontrol (www.supercontrol.co.uk)
I would definetly suggest this system to everybody wish to control in a simple and fast way the complete booking process. From the enquiry to the payment.

www.feelingitaly.com

[Lisac]

Had an interesting email from vipvillas saying they will now settle booking revenue earlier in the process if an owner gets 'validated' by them.
I've asked for more detail and will post when i get it.

[AMC]

I haven't been on this thread for quite some time, but in reply to Greenbarns 'showstoppers' regarding vipvillas, he/she is incorrect.

You can set a minimum and / or a maximum number of nights allowable to be booked. Also you have to input both weekly and nightly rates.
I think it charges the weekly rate for 'full' weeks booked and then the nightly rate (in case its more money for less than a week).

Once you have used them and they know that both you and your property are genuine, you can request payment earlier. They have a checking system which validates you and your property and checks your genuine and you can get paid long before you would normally.

Sorry Greenbarn but its no good offering advise if its not accurate, and i can say through experience that i have been satisfied by them so far and have not had any reason to be dissatisfied with them.

[AMC]

Sorry Lisac didn't see you had said some of what i had included. I simply had to reply to Greenbarns incorrect assumptions on what i feel is a good system.

[greenbarn]

Thanks for the additional info. It was quite a while back that I looked at the system, so I'm a bit vague - one or two birthdays since then! However, any assumptions I made at the time were based solely on what was available from VIP's website, so it's good to get a more informed source based on experience. No need to apologise either, as I certainly wasn't offering advice ; I was only interested (back then) in pooled research on the whole topic.

IIRC my assumption was based on being tied to a weekly or nightly rate, and it therefore seemed that it would not be simple (possible?) to have two different rates for the same week; ie a full week (simple!), then a weekend and a midweek break both at the same total price, but one being three nights and the other being four nights - so a different nightly rate for each. It wasn't obvious how that could be handled by a system that only allowed for weekly or nightly rates, and as it's obviously a common requirement it'll be useful for others to know if the system can indeed handle it.

Once you have used them and they know that both you and your property are genuine, you can request payment earlier.

That would make a big difference. Have they now changed their system such that the owner can receive both the deposit payment (essential for cash flow), and the final payment, within a realistic timescale - say 10 days from when VIP receive the funds in each case?

Sorry - I'm probably asking questions that can now be answered by looking at VIP's (hopefully improved) website! However, answers from a user's perspective are perhaps more useful and detailed - as has already been demonstrated - and helpful to those still looking for a suitable system who might find VIP ticks more boxes than previously.

[nstead]

The system allows you to discount in any way you require. You set up special offers via date and price in the admin area.

Well, no, actually it doesn't - and this is my biggest bugbear with Vipvillas.

I started using them a few months back, having switched from RS. At the time, they promised that they were developing a whizzy new system with all sorts of new features.

Most of the new system arrived (about 3 months later than promised) - but one thing that was sorely lacking were most of the discounting features available with RS.

I emailed Vipvillas to say that I felt their discount system was very limited compared to RS, and asking whether they had any plans to improve it, so that I would be able to:

1) Give an automatic 10% discount on all stays longer than 12 days, but only in July and August (with the Red items being configurable)

2) Set up Discount codes which offer different discounts - for example one code to give to previous guests, which would give them a 10% discount, and another for friends and family, which would give them a 75% discount.

3) Set up automatic "Early bird" and "Last minute" discounts - for example 10% discount for all bookings made more than 6 months in advance, and a 30% discount for all bookings made less than 2 weeks in advance.

The reply I got from them was quite dismissive:

There are no plans to alter the pricing input or offers section. It is more not less flexibile than VR. It just means you have to use the flexibility.

I sent another email asking him to explain what he meant, since I couldn't think of a single discount I could set up with VipVillas, but not in VR/RS - whereas the reverse is clearly true - but I got no reply.

At the same time as they upgraded their booking system, VipVillas also changed the HTML code that owners useto embed the VipVillas calendar on their own websites - but they didn't tell the owners. Result: The prices that the calendar was showing only took account of the Daily rates, and not the weekly one, meaning that anyone checking the price for a week in August was seeing a price that was about 20% higher than it should have been.
When I complained, they told me that I was responsible for the code on my website, and it was my fault for not reading the emails. When I asked them for a copy of the email in which they had explicitly told their customers that they needed to change the HTML code, I was again met with silence.

I've also discovered that when I link to the VIPVillas calendar from my website, all of my discount codes are visible - even the ones that I have marked as "do not display on calendar". I reported this on Jan 2nd, and was told it would be fixed. I reported it again a week ago, and got no reply.

Initially, I was impressed with the swift replies to enquiries, but I'm afraid that now I've started asking them difficult questions, they're no better than RS were. Perhaps it's time to use something else.

[Margalide]

1) Give an automatic 10% discount on all stays longer than 12 days, but only in July and August (with the Red items being configurable)

2) Set up Discount codes which offer different discounts - for example one code to give to previous guests, which would give them a 10% discount, and another for friends and family, which would give them a 75% discount.

3) Set up automatic "Early bird" and "Last minute" discounts - for example 10% discount for all bookings made more than 6 months in advance, and a 30% discount for all bookings made less than 2 weeks in advance.

Initially, I was impressed with the swift replies to enquiries, but I'm afraid that now I've started asking them difficult questions, they're no better than RS were. Perhaps it's time to use something else.

I had vipengine shortlisted when looking at booking but wasn't impressed, their website didn't explain anything and they never answered my email asking how much is it & can it do this & that.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure the one we did plump for can do all 3 of your discounts, I just added some friends so they can go through the booking system and gave them 100% discount!
The other discount we wanted was for Couples who stay and it's got that too.
Ros

[nstead]

@Margalide: Which one did you plump for?

At present, I'm looking for others - but the problem I have is finding someone that will process card payments.

Most of the others that people have listed rely on either PayPal or a Merchant account. With the reports of PayPal's rolling retention (plus their tendency to side with the buyer in any dispute), I don't really want to go that route, but the Merchant account route is also problematic, since at present all payments go to our Spanish bank account, so I'd either have to set up a Spanish merchant account, or set up a UK one and then pay £25-30 a time to transfer the money to Spain. And our turnover isn't really high enough to justify the expense anyway!

Neil.

[AMC]

Hello all,
Interesting reading. I think that we all want what nstead wants, i know i do.

A site that offers everything i may need or want, process card payments but i don't want to pay for it or pay for transfer fees into another currency!! mmmmmm where am i going to find it?

I would be pleased if you can let me know when you do, i will be hot on your heels.