Best posts made by Alistair Wood

Interested to know when the next update to the website functionality might be coming along?

There are a few issues and also a few things that would be very helpful to have

Issues
The main one is initial prices are shown without fees like VAT or cleaning then only when the customer goes to book are these added. 1. I'm not sure this is even legal under EU law and that's why Booking etc now includes all mandatory fees in the pricing. 2. It's not great from a sales perspective as it sets a false expectation especially if you are charging vat as the price is suddenly hiked by 20% as the customer sees it.
Only today I had a customer say, "it says prices from £xyz, when can I book at that price"? The answer is currently never as those are without VAT or cleaning fee, not a great answer to have to give them.

Additional Functionality required

1. The ability to offer coupons for either fixed rates/date and percentage discounts
2. The ability to offer upsell items, early/late check-in, hampers, chocolates etc etc
3. Change the "Book Now" button to say something else as it puts people off as they think they are about to book before even getting actual prices after picking dates

The problem of guest info coming through from Booking with for example 2 adults when in reality booking was for 2 adults and 2 children is still outstanding. This information should come through correctly, there is another section in the API which appears to have adult and child numbers split out (total can then be calculated) so the correct info is there and available. I sent the API extract to support some time ago so it would be good to have some feedback if this is going to be resolved soon as it causes an ongoing issue with cleaners setting up the apartment. They may see one guest but in reality, it's 1 adult and 3 children for example. From memory, I also can't even work around this myself by manually updating with the correct info in Tokeet as this gets overwritten. (and by that time the wrong info has gone out to the guest in their email confirmation creating further confusion anyway)

Is there anything happening on this in the near future? Would be really good to have HomeAway and TripAdvisor supported for pricing (via RateGenie) and bookings as soon as possible.

This was happening a while back as I was going to be one of the trial users but it all went quiet, not sure what happened but it's definitely something that would be very useful.

We do something along these lines using the Gap Night option in RateGenie and then putting in a positive percentage. For example, a one night rate is the standard rate +30%, plus cleaning fee.

One more thought on this one, length of stay discounts on the websites would also be useful. We have been caught out by undercutting ourselves on longer potential bookings as OTA's like AirBnb offer length of stay discounts and this can mean the prices are lower there than direct.