We think communication between holiday home owners and guests is pretty important.
As a home owner you'd probably like to know as much as you can about who you are giving access to your property, and for potential guests, knowing who they are sending a large chunk of their holiday budget can be reassuring too.
This should be clear to everyone however sometimes simple communication becomes a real pain.
Why Some Listing Sites Block Guest Communication
Many listing websites like AirBnB, VRBO, and Booking.com have commission-based business models, this means they earn their money by charging a percentage of your booking value.
To make sure they get their commission they need to ensure they are aware of all the bookings they generate for you.
If they let you talk to guests freely before a booking is confirmed then you may decide to cut them out of the loop and avoid paying their commission, great for you and your guest, not so great for them.
The only way they can guarantee to know about every booking is to force you to use their own systems for all guest communication.
You are not allowed to give out your phone number or email address either on your listing or in any guest communications, if you try to their messaging system will automatically block / remove those details from your messages.
Any attempt to circumvent their rules could see you being permanently banned from using their services.
A Simpler Way
We want to encourage communication not block it.
One of the many advantages of our commission free listing websites is that we don't need to get in your way when it comes to talking with guests.
Our business model does not rely on commissions so we really have no interest or desire in making things more complex than they need to be.
You can choose to put your phone number right on your listing page if you want to, we have no problem with this and find that guests like the fact that they can speak directly with home owners before making a booking.
All property adverts also have a contact form which is directly connected to your email address, all enquiries come straight through to your private email box without any delay or interference from us.
We do keep a copy of enquiries so that you can see them in your admin area as a backup, but they are your enquiries to do with as you wish.
Finally, if you have your own website then you can even list that directly on your listing advert, we want to give you every opportunity to get that enquiry and booking.
Penalised For Slow Responses
In addition to blocking your communications many listing sites monitor how quickly you respond to enquiries.
They want you to respond quickly as statistics show that home owners that do generate more bookings which means more money for them.
This leads to listings by home owners that respond quicker than you being prioritised in search results over your advert, even if your property may be a better match.
We all know that some enquiries are a waste of time, sometimes people ask for dates which are clearly not available, or make requests that are pretty ridiculous (does the £70 per night charge include flights??).
Despite this some home owners I've spoken to end up sending panicked responses to every message they receive in an effort to keep the listing sites happy.
It's a complete waste of time and can be pretty stressful for the home owner too.
Respond How and When You Want
As you can probably guess we do not penalise you for taking a bit longer to answer your enquiries.
You can also ignore them completely if you want to, it is up to you.
Whilst getting back to potential guests in a timely fashion is a good idea, our goal is to simply get you the enquiries in the first place, you can then deal with them whenever and however you want, without fear of being penalised.