I’ve been running Booking.com and all other OTA’s from Mews through Channel Manager integrations in the Marketplace (Siteminder and Synxis). Is there any reason to pull Booking.com off the Channel Managers and connect directly with the Booking.com integration? Or is this directed more towards hotels that do not currently have an integration and are managing Booking.com manually through the extranet? 

Hi @willjordan, 

We had booking.com connected via Siteminder and changed to the direct Mews integration.
Main benefits are we’ve found:

• The integration pulls reservations every 30 seconds instead of SiteMinder 2 minutes, resulting in less overbookings
• Rate, Inventory & Restrictions updates make it to booking.com quicker than if mapped via Siteminder
• If a settlement rule fails due to insufficient funds / invalid card the integration auto reports to booking.com which in turn contacts the guest & asks to update payment method of failed payments, you can then cancel/release the reservation after 2 hours if they fail to update. 

Hi @Mick 

How are you handeling the automatic releases of certain room types?

I’ve read somewhere that if a reservation from Booking.com is cancelled, the room is automaticaly opened up for sale again without verifying if still availble in Mews. Is this something which you are experiencing as well?

@barbora.maffia Do you have an answer on this question from @MatthiasH ?
We are thinking about changing to the direct integration as well, but if the above is true this can be an important reason to not do this.

Hi @Egon Lagrou ,

I had a discussion last month with the support-team, and they informed me that this is sadly still an ongoing thing. It looks like there is no movement in this case.

@Mick, have / do you experience this?

Hi @Egon Lagrou & @MatthiasH, 

Great news we think it has been fixed, I received notification early May from our CS manager, that the issue had been resolved.

In the last 11 weeks, we haven't been experiencing the issue any longer at least not to the magnitude to before the fix. I've chatted with a few of our managers and they haven't been experiencing the same booking.com overbooking scenario. 
 

@Mick @MatthiasH 
That’s a great thing to hear. Probably I’ll try this integration somewhere in September then, too busy for the moment to catch certain bugs or unclarities now when they would occur.

Other question:
Is it possible to have multiple Booking.com direct integrations on one Mews property?
Our Casselbergh Residences brand consists of different physical locations, which all have a different Booking.com property ID, but we manage them in one Mews account. I am wondering if this link would be possible as well.
 

@Egon Lagrou, 

From what I learned on the help pages, you just have to create multiple integrations (same thing you would do for channel managers like Cubilis). More info about the set-up can be found here.

Hello everyone!
The issue mentioned by @MatthiasH is resolved and rooms available on B.com should be reflecting your actual available inventory! 
Regarding multiple B.com integrations question from @Egon Lagrou  - it is possible. You simply add multiple integrations on Marketplace, each of them connected to your B.com extranet (with unique Property ID) and map the applicable space categories and rates. 

We are also using the direct integration with Booking.com. 

One disadvantage compared to SiteMinder is that you cannot use a rate multiplier. This sometimes comes in handy, if you’d like to make specific rates more/less expensive on an OTA. 

@willjordan 

We have the mews-booking integration running since 12 month. it works. All other channels go through a channel manager (currently HNS, but testing siteminder with some connections currently) 

The only problem with the direct connection is that we do not receive an email from B.com on cancelled reservations. They just disappear.. You have to manually search for them. We looked into it together with b.com, mews and our email provider, but it seams that mews prevents B.com emails in this case. Very strange, but we could not resolve the issue so far.

Would be interesting to hear if anyone else experienced a similar problem.

Hi @Max, 

We don’t recieve any email notifications for cancelled reservations from booking.com

If you want to know about the cancelled Reservations, you could schedule a reservation report and send at what ever period you’d like (daily, hourly) and use filters for Booking.com, cancelled, this would snd a summary report to your inbox. 

Alternatively, you could use Zapier and create a Zap which sends an email each time a booking.com reservation is cancelled. 

Hope that helps. 

I haven't worked with Zapier so far, but it sounds like we have to have a dive into it. That might be a good option. On the other hand I do not understand why the email issue with B.com exists...

Correct me if im wrong but doesn't a booking.com integration count as one of your integration. We only have 5 so I dont think this work for us.

Hello @llandudnohostel,

if you are on a starter package, then the Booking integration does count as one of the five.

I was checking a bit more about the notifications and at the moment Booking that does not send notifications to properties when a reservation is cancelled, they only sends emails as a fallback option if the update failed to be delivered.

Update apparently booking.com doesn't count as an integration my account manager just confirmed this. Not sure if this applies to Expedia.com .The only issue I have now is how to do a OTA uplift on mews can we create different products for booking.com  only that have higher price. 

Hello @llandudnohostel , as per @MarketaOupi ,direct integrations the booking.com and Expedia do count as integrations. For example, If you are subscribed to our starter package and connected to both OTA directly , you will be able to connect to 3 additional integrations. 

Please let me know in case you need any further clarification on that topic.

That’s a shame . I’ve been told wrong information from someone then