19/07/2023
BOOKING.COM NOT BEING HONEST ABOUT THEIR PAYOUTS TO PROPERTIES
ALTO Beyond has received not one, not two, but FOUR inexplicable delays for payouts owed to our property.
A perpetual reference to maintenance on the Booking.com Finance System is a ruse - nothing more than a mendacious distraction, designed to allay anxious partners. I never use the term Partner when dealing with Booking.com, quite simply because they do not treat property owners as partners. They have abused their dominant market position for too long, and this time, they have gone too far.
Carrying out so-called maintenance work during the beginning of peak holiday season when properties are staffing up and paying out vast sums to acquire & keep labour - yes, we are ALL suffering labour shortages; is not indicative of a commercially tenable partnership. How should we pay staff, let alone suppliers and overhead, if we have no income??
Then there have been the multitude of Invoices wherein Booking.com claims that the property owes THEM for uncollected commissions. Excuse me??? Booking.com makes its deductions of commission and fees as soon as it receives the funds from the Booker/Guest. Never in the history of Booking.com has commission NOT been calculated and deducted at source by them!
So why raise these ever increasing and erroneous invoices aimed at the property? However you dress this up, Booking.com is playing a dangerous game of trying to bamboozle its properties listed on the site. Some poor operators are falling for it and actually PAYING Booking.com for Commission that has ALREADY been deducted. How long do you think it will take before Booking.com reimburses those poor suckers??
The question is, why? What is Booking.com hiding? Why this constant delay in payouts? What else is Booking.com about to impose onto properties like ALTO Beyond??
It seems I am not alone in being unable to pay staff and suppliers because of this gross delay in revenue owed by Booking.com, but I am at my wits end.
I am about to cancel a booking of 42 nights valued at more than thousands of €Euro because of these unprecedented deceptions by Booking.com; we simply do not have the cashflow to host them to the standards we promote. I will be advising them to cancel rather than incur more debt for my company, which has already had payouts delayed more than 21 days.
Are we the only ones suffering at the hands of the money monster known as Booking.com?
