Make every holiday rental booking count. Use manual reporting for offline bookings, along with our automatic Booking Update Service API, to get an accurate acceptance rate. Your acceptance rate affects your rank in the search results. Learn how to get credit when it’s due.
Get credit for your holiday rental bookings
The Booking Update Service API has two primary functions:
- Updating reservation details after a booking has been confirmed or changed online (including date, pricing and cancellation data).
- Reporting leads from our platform that have been manually entered in your software back to our platform. We call these bookings ‘offline bookings’.
While Booking Update Service automatically calculates all bookings and cancellations that happen on our platform, it’s up to you to attribute all offline bookings and cancellations within Booking Update Service.* This ensures that we capture those numbers too.
For context, an on-platform booking/cancellation is any booking or cancellation made through our checkout process. An offline booking/cancellation is any booking or cancellation not made on our platform, e.g., bookings made over the phone, any that are booked offline manually after an enquiry has been made on our site, etc.
Offline bookings and cancellations are not visible to us unless you tell us about them, so you won’t get credit for those transactions unless you make sure to attribute them on your software.
Pro tip: Most software calls the attribution field a ‘marketing source’ or ‘source of business’. If you can’t find the field within your software, reach out to property manager support and we’ll help you locate it.
Attributing offline bookings means accurate reporting
Manual reporting of offline bookings and cancellations via Booking Update Service results in the most accurate reporting. And accurate reporting means you also benefit from:
Accurate billing and commissions on your monthly pay-per-booking listings — This is essential to ensuring you don’t get charged for cancelled offline bookings. If you don’t report a cancellation through the Booking Update Service, you may be incorrectly charged for it. Conversely, if we’re informed about the cancellation, you won’t be charged for it.
Accurate conversion rates — You want to get credit where credit is due. Report every booking you earn to make sure you don’t miss out on a higher ranking in search. When properties with successful bookings are reported, they’re considered higher value properties to travellers. So, they’ll appear higher in the search results when those properties meet the traveller’s search criteria and available dates.
More bookings reported = better booking conversion ratio = better market rank.
Accurate service fee information — It’s important to accurately attribute all cancellation info through the Booking Update Service so we can refund the Traveller Service Fee back to travellers for online bookings that incur it.
*Commission fee applied where applicable.
Need help attributing offline bookings?
Our property manager support team is here for you. Get in touch and they’ll help you determine how to attribute offline bookings using your holiday rental software.
