Connecting to Booking.com

How to get set up your direct, two-way connection between Inn Style and Booking.com.

Emma Knight avatar
Written by Emma Knight
Updated over a week ago

The Approval Process

Please read this guide thoroughly if you'd like to connect Inn Style to your Booking.com account. There are four steps to the manual approval process.

  1. You go to your Booking.com extranet and request Inn Style as your Channel Manager

  2. Booking.com tells Inn Style that you want to connect your property

  3. We ask you to accept the information in this document, and we then approve the request from Booking.com 

  4. You set the connection live via your Booking.com extranet

Please note: We're unable to connect you to Booking.com as part of your free trial, and ask that you commit to subscribing for a minimum of two months once the connection is established. Should you choose to cancel your Inn Style account during that period, you will incur an administration fee of £100.

Let’s make things absolutely clear

The primary purpose of connecting to Booking.com is to prevent you from manually adding bookings into different calendars. The second purpose is to enable you to edit prices and rules from within Inn Style – so everything is managed from one system.

Please note: Inn Style does not change anything about your contractual obligations with Booking.com. You will still pay them the same fees, and you will still be bound by their T&Cs.

If you can't accept a booking because your availability wasn't up to date, you may still be liable for the commissions charges, and potentially the cost of providing alternative accommodation.

But it’s not all worry, worry, worry. 

Booking.com will get you more bookings and more revenue. Yes, you pay a premium – but you pay a premium because these guys spend more money with Google than anybody else to get you bookings.

If in doubt, close it out

If there are specific dates that you can sell for a high price – such as a festival – be very, very careful.

If you're only taking bookings up to a certain date on Inn Style, you must manually add closures for further dates on Booking.com – otherwise guests can still book.

People are always looking for bargains for these events, so if you accidentally release availability for one night at the normal rate, it’s likely that you’ll sell it fast.

We recommend closing these important days out on Inn Style before performing your initial sync. Once you’re live, you can add higher prices, minimum stays or simply close off availability on Booking.com if needed. You can then re-open the rooms on Inn Style to enable direct bookings only.

If you’re concerned about selling a lucrative weekend for peanuts, please get in touch and we’ll do some checks. However, please note we can't be held ultimately responsible for any inaccuracies.

Happy to proceed? Then let’s begin!

Setup

Matching your Inn Style inventory to Booking.com

Your bookables (rooms, cottages, tents etc) are separate units on Inn Style. Put simply, if you have seven rooms, you have seven bookables.

Booking.com works on room types. So if you have seven double rooms, you won't see seven separate units – you'll just see one unit. In this case, it would be Double Room – and that will display a ‘rooms to sell’ value (in other words, how many rooms are still available). Rooms to Sell would show seven if you’re empty. It would show zero if you’re full.

During setup, we need to match your bookables in Inn Style to your room types on Booking.com. Sometimes the room descriptions will be listed differently on Booking.com, so it's important we know exactly which room matches what. We will ask you to confirm this information before we connect you.

If you have multiple units within a category, for example seven separate double rooms, Booking.com will list all seven double rooms – you won't be able to just send a few of the units from one category. If you only want to send some of the units, please let us know and we will have to map these separately. 

During set up, we also need to match your rates in Inn Style to your rates on Booking.com. The rates have to map 1-1 – so if you have multiple price options, you will need to reflect

this on both sides.

Important to note when making use of Length of Stay pricing on Booking.com:

If you have Length of Stay pricing on Inn Style (where you have 2,3,4,5,6,7 night prices loaded) this ‘can’ be sent to booking.com. However, the B.com connection does NOT understand ANY minimum stay rules, or no check-in/check-out rules. It simply will sell ANY price in your Inn Style calendar REGARDLESS of the rules in Inn Style.

The best way to avoid these issues is to have a simple nightly rate on a Per Room Per Night basis for booking.com only. It is easier to manage and maintain this way.

Performing an initial sync

We can match bookables before your connection is live. (That's because we’re only retrieving your data). However, the initial sync can’t be done until you activate the connection from within your Booking.com extranet.

We'll do the first full sync as part of the connection – just let us know the date you want to be available until! After that, it's very easy for you to sync your data across. 

Simply go to Distribution > Manage Two Way Connection > Sync All Prices, and select the new dates you want to send.

Booking.com allow you to accept bookings up to 16 months in advance, so it's always best to upload prices for the next 18-24 months if you can. The more availability you give them, the higher up you'll be in their search list! Go to Distribution and MANAGE TWO WAY CONNECTIONS then press SYNC ALL to send them more availability.

PLEASE NOTE THAT IF YOU HAVE SENT A CLOSED RULE THROUGH TO CHANNELS YOU MUST SEND AN OPEN RULE TO REINSTATE AVAILABILITY - A SYNC ALL WILL NOT SUFFICE.

When you confirm your connection to Booking.com, any existing rates on Booking.com will be removed. From that point on, rates will need to be pushed directly from Inn Style.

You can re-sync your data at any point, although Inn Style automatically updates your availability after bookings and closures are added, amended and deleted.

What does Inn Style actually sync?

In short, Inn Style pulls bookings from Booking.com into Inn Style, and pushes availability from Inn Style into Booking.com. 

Pulling bookings from Booking.com into Inn Style

The most important thing to note here is that we can only pull in Booking.com reservations that are made after the connection is switched on. This means all existing Booking.com bookings will need to be added to Inn Style first. Please contact us if you need to transfer these bookings across. We do not currently have the ability to add children within the reservation. Please check B.com reservations for occupancy levels and add children into the reservation manually.

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