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We know cancellations can be a pain. From increased workload to the stress of reselling rooms, they make your day-to-day more challenging. Worst case scenario, they can lead to lost revenue.

That’s why, as part of our commitment to you and our partnership, we’ve launched an initiative to reduce harmful cancellations at your property.

Tackling cancellations at Booking.com

We know cancellations can be a pain. From increased workload to the stress of finding a new guest, they make your day-to-day more challenging. Worst case scenario, they can lead to lost revenue.

That’s why, as part of our commitment to you and our partnership, we’ve launched an initiative to reduce harmful cancellations at your property.

What are we doing?

We now have teams dedicated to investigating and solving your biggest challenges when it comes to cancellations, and we’ve already made changes based on your feedback:


person_pin “Most times there are invalid credit cards and when guests cancel within our policy we simply lose revenue”

Feedback like this tells us that we can do more to help you secure revenue. That’s why we’ve developed innovations on our website that help you:

  1. Handle invalid credit cards much faster
  2. Re-sell your cancelled rooms much faster
  3. Send chargeback claims directly in the extranet
  4. Verify credit card details whenever possible

person_pin “If it is a genuine reason to cancel, then we would appreciate knowing”

We realised that not all cancellations are the same – sometimes you want to know whether you should strictly enforce your policies or make a compassionate exception. To help you stay informed, we now ask every guest to share their reasons for cancelling.

  • The card not having sufficient funds for a payment
  • The card having a block from the provider preventing its usage
  • The card not being approved to process international transactions

Body copy talking about taking feedback on board and making several small improvements to our products and services. These innovations will attract the right guests and make the most of this peak season. This is what a link would look like too. Body copy talking about taking

Meet Fabrizio & Francesca

Just two of the brains behind Booking.com’s cancellation initiative.


They work with hundreds of colleagues conducting research and driving innovation to reduce cancellations. Some of you may have seen them present at our global partner events conference, Click.


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Body copy talking about taking feedback on board and making several small improvements to our products and services. These innovations will attract the right guests and make the most of this peak season. This is what a link would look like too. Body copy talking about taking

What can you do?

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Get top tips

Read our article on top 7 tips to reduce cancellations in the Partner Help Centre.

 

Ask other partners

Partners like you are already discussing cancellations in the Partner Forum.

 

Hear from the experts

Read our feature article on cancellations ‘dealing with no-shows’

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Body copy talking about taking feedback on board and making several small improvements to our products and services. These innovations will attract the right guests and make the most of this peak season.

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Body copy talking about taking feedback on board and making several small improvements to our products and services.

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Body copy talking about taking feedback on board and making several small improvements to our products and services. These innovations will attract the right guests and make the most of this peak season.

Title Display One in 1/3 column

Body copy talking about taking feedback on board and making several small improvements to our products and services. These innovations will attract the right guests and make the most of this peak season.

Title Display One in 2/3 column

Body copy talking about taking feedback on board and making several small improvements to our products and services.

Title Display One in 3/3 column

Body copy talking about taking feedback on board and making several small improvements to our products and services. These innovations will attract the right guests and make the most of this peak season.

Not likely to stay

These are bookers who may not intend to stay at your property. We want to reduce this way of using our site as much as possible. How?

By requesting credit card details for ‘No credit card’ properties within 24 hours

By checking the user’s credit card at time of booking for properties that require a credit card (pre-authorisation)

By forcing such customer to ‘Pay Now’ though Payments by Booking (when available) to secure your reservation with no additional risk to you.

Indecisive users

These bookers might be keeping their options open, might not trust their first choice or might not be the decision maker in their household. So how do we help them be more decisive and decrease overlapping bookings?

Reduce flexibility of Booking.com eco-system, so when these guests search we make sure they don’t see as many free-cancellation options

Making the free-cancellation period shorter so they’re encouraged to make a decision faster (i.e. limited free cancellation policy)

Very likely to stay

These bookers want to stay at your property – how can we make sure they actually do? Or if they do need to cancel, how can we make this happen faster and with minimal stress on your end?

Decrease cancellations by facilitating modifications

Facilitate admin-free rebooking

Make users cancel sooner with the limited-free cancellation policy

Stay tuned

Keep an eye out for more changes in 2019 and please continue to provide us with feedback. As always, thanks for your partnership!

Do you feel like Booking.com is addressing your concerns about cancellations?

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