Find answers to frequently asked questions about the Booking.com integration app.
What is the safety margin?
The safety margin in the Booking.com app settings serves to minimise the risk of double bookings.
In the synchronisation of availability between Booking Experts and this channel, the number of available objects per type per day is transmitted. This does not contain any information about which objects these are exactly. This could lead to the following situation:
The channel sees that there is 1 available object on three consecutive days. This corresponds to the availability in Booking Experts, but on the Planboard it is clear that this is a different object on each of the three days. Existing reservations with various arrival and departure dates have booked the other dates. The channel does not know this, and sells a three-day stay. This creates a problem for you, because you do not have an object that is available for three consecutive days.
A safety margin of 1 object per day ensures that the availability passed on to the channel is 1 less than what is actually available. This significantly reduces the chance of the above scenario occurring. If a type only contains 1 object, this safety margin is not applied.
How are reservations processed via Booking.com?
When your guest makes a reservation via Booking.com, they have an overview of the various costs that are included in the price or will be invoiced. This depends on your pricing and synchronisation settings.
Note that your guests cannot indicate through Booking.com if they are bringing a pet.
After making a reservation, the guest receives a confirmation from both Booking.com and your PMS administration. If the guest should pay you directly, your confirmation message also includes a payment link.
Note that Booking.com doesn’t provide you with the guest’s actual email address, the email address linked to the reservation is generated by Booking.com and acts as a pass-through. If desired, you can set up an auto email to ask Booking.com guests for their email addresses.
In all other aspects, a Booking.com reservation is exactly the same as any other reservation.
Why is there a price difference with Booking.com?
If the price of the reservation you received from Booking.com differs from what your own PMS states, this may have several causes.
Always check first whether you have enabled discounts in your Booking.com account, such as a Genius discount. These discounts are not passed on to your PMS administration. You have to either disable the discounts in your Booking.com account, or manually add this discount to the reservation.
Check whether your pricing settings and costs are set up correctly for this channel.
Take into account whether you are using basic rent prices or all-in prices, because this affects how costs are handled. Are costs set to be included or excluded in the channel settings? If you are using basic rent, this should be set to excluded, while for all-in prices it should be included.
If you have a cost that you want your guest to pay upon arrival, even when you use all-in prices, you can edit this cost to be excluded. Edit the cost item, and in the 'invoicing' section, under 'other settings', you tick the box 'Do not include in all-in prices'. Be sure that this cost does appear on the guest invoice, not the channel invoice, by marking it as such in the channel settings. Read more about how to do this: Costs on guest- or channel invoice
Why can’t guests book for a stay of more than 30 days?
The maximum number of consecutive nights per stay that can be booked through Booking.com is 30 nights. This is not extendable, it is a hard limitation of the integration between BEX PMS and Booking.com.