Registering your property with Booking.com opens your accommodation to a worldwide audience and gives you the automation you need to succeed.

In a fiercely competitive hospitality market, a good and global booking engine that is also a travel channel partner is essential when it comes to filling up your rooms and managing reservations, calendars, and capacity. In our research, we have found Booking.com to be one of the leading and most comprehensive resources out there. 

Customer-focused and part of the popular Priceline.com family, Booking.com will help you get guests in your rooms who otherwise may not have known about your property, thanks to their marketing techniques and huge user base. 

Let’s face it: digital marketing and SEO is hard work that takes a good deal of time and money. A good travel channel partner can go a very long way toward boosting your branding and getting guests in the door. In this day and age, you’ve simply got to automate and a good SaaS (Software as a Service) such as Booking.com will do wonders for your business.

We have compiled this handy guide to help you list your property (hotel, guesthouse, resort, or even treehouse!) on Booking.com, and start reaping the benefits of their global presence and reputation in the market.

History

Booking.com was started in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 1996, when founder Geert-Jan Bruinsma noticed a gap in the hotel reservation platform online. In 2005, the company was bought by The Priceline Group for $133 million, and today accounts for more than two thirds of Priceline’s total revenue. Originally a listing place for hotel rooms, Booking.com now has a range of accommodation from hotels, to B&B’s, to luxury resorts, even treehouses and igloos!

The Service – Listing, Fees, and Reach

The premise of Booking.com is a simple one: accommodation owners partner with the site and provide listing information for their properties, which subsequently show up in Booking.com’s catalog of available rooms. The site also promotes hotels through search engine listings. Booking.com then takes a commission based on each booking made through the site.

It is free to sign up on Booking.com and put your hotel at the fingertips of guests who book more than 1.5million room nights each day. Offered in over 40 languages, the site has more than 950,000 participating properties. Getting your business listed on the site is as easy as filling out a form, and it will be instantly available for bookings and reviews. The commission-based service even offers 24/7 multilingual assistance and markets your property on various search engines.

Once you complete your listing, you are able to update your availability and rates online. When someone books with you through the site, you will receive a confirmation notice, and the guest will pay their bill upon arrival or departure. Booking.com fees are set at a base rate of15% on completed (upon guest arrival) bookings, with an option to upgrade to their Preferred Member service. Commission is only paid when the guests show up to stay at your property – if they cancel or don’t show, you don’t pay.

Statistics

• Long-term relationship with more than 950,000 hotels worldwide
• 95,000,000+ guest reviews
• 1,550,000 room nights booked per day from more than 5.7 million listings
• 143,171 destinations in 230 countries and territories worldwide
• # 1 most visited travel site by traffic
• 100+ million visits a month
• Accessible to over 220 countries, in 42 languages

Partnership Perks

When you register your property with Booking.com, you have a chance to be seen by a huge, worldwide audience that may otherwise never know you existed. Because Booking.com will also actively market your hotel and work to boost your search results on sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, you also have greater visibility, leading to increased bookings. 

There are many ways Booking.com leverages their presence on the web to increase the visibility of your property:

• Promoting you on search engines for guests searching globally
• Ensuring your property is advertised on Google Maps
• Partnering with airlines such as Emirates, American Airlines, easyJet, KLM and many more
• Actively promoting the Booking.com site through media outlets and influencers, so that the brand remains recognizable and trusted amongst travelers

Booking.com is also associated with other trusted travel sites, such as Kayak, RentalCars.com, and OpenTable and offers services through its site such as airport taxi and shuttle bookings powered by Rideways.

Joining

With perks like these, you’re probably wondering how to register to Booking.com and start leveraging all of the benefits of joining the site.

To sign up on Booking.com is easy – simply visit the registration page, fill in your name and email address, and complete the instructions. Select your property type – there are many to choose from in order to be sure the category suits your offering – and listing details.

On the backend of your listing are handy features such as:

• Set up support – Booking.com supports you every step of the way to ensure your listing is comprehensive and attractive to your newfound audience
• The ability to turn your property “off” and “on” – there are no contracts, so your property can be made visible or hidden on the site whenever you like
• Determine your availability – available dates can be fine-tuned however you like (weekends only, seasonal bookings, etc.)
• No exclusivity – the site has features which allow you to manage your availability around any existing partnerships you may have with other agencies, making it easy to ensure you don’t overbook

Make Your Property Stand Out

With all of the features and opportunity in Booking.com’s system, you’ll want to do as much as you can to make your property really shine. There are a couple of things to be mindful of when listing your property and making it stand out amongst the options.

Make sure your profile is complete

Completed profiles – ones with many high-quality images, a full and enticing description, and list of amenities – are bound to attract more travelers. Make sure you invest in taking beautiful photos of your property to give guests the opportunity to envision themselves there. The more amenities and services you can list, the less questions and more confidence guests have in booking your property and knowing what to expect.

References and reviews are the best advertising

Having reviews from other guests who have stayed with you are the best way to build trust in your property amongst travelers considering staying with you. Ensure that you are responsive to guest questions or concerns – should they arise – before the guest even arrives, and continue this practice while they stay with you. While they’re staying with you, check in to ensure everything is going well, ask if there is any need for improvement and solicit feedback. Once guests have completed their stay, send them a short email to thank them for their visit and ask them to write a review of their stay (be sure to provide them with a link to where to write the review, making it easy on them to do so). Overall, good communication and attention to their needs goes a long way to ensure your guests are happy, and that they will be happy to write a reference for you.

DPO and Booking.com

For hospitality, DPO offers secure payment processing for customer transactions made through Booking.com. The site also allows guests to pay upon arrival, giving them the freedom to choose how they would like to pay for their room (and giving you more of a chance to add on other services). If guests book through the site and either cancel or don’t show, you don’t pay any commission fees. Commissions can be paid without transfer fees directly through DPO’s network of merchants (xPay) Find out more about DPO’s payment solutions for hotels.