How to manage Booking's new Smart Flex Bookings
These new bookings may harm the hotel's interests, competing with direct sales from its website or increasing the risk of cancellations.
Booking has recently developed so-called Smart Flex bookings, formerly known as Risk Free Bookings. This change is taking place without the hotelier being informed, so they are offering bookings with new conditions that they are not aware of. At this point the question is: what should we do when faced with the new conditions proposed with this type of booking?
With this update, Booking.com decides when to modify the cancellation policy of your hotel without asking your permission and offer it to selected customers. What happens if you receive a booking with these new conditions? At this point you will have to accept it if you are part of the programme. GuestPro suggests our clients to deactivate this type of booking for the following reasons:
- Smart Flex bookings create disparity with those of the hotel's own website and other channels, being more flexible so you run the risk of losing direct sales.
- Indeed, cancellations will increase and although they will be guaranteed, they will lead to inconveniences in the hotel's operations and a certain degree of insecurity.
- The average price will go down as the most expensive rate, the flexible rate that you had before, now becomes meaningless.
How to deactivate this type of booking?
This new booking category has been activated almost without warning, so hotels have not been able to reject it in an easy and simple way. Here are the steps to follow to deactivate Smart Flex bookings from the booking.com extranet:
STEP 1
Go to opportunities > Smart Flex booking programme:
STEP 2
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the "leave programme" link (marked in yellow in the image):
STEP 3
It is important to specify "indefinitely" to avoid the automatic reactivation of the programme after a few months.
With these 3 simple steps you will deactivate this category of Smart Flex bookings that GuestPro believes can generate too many cancellations for our clients.
