These webinars are basically here just to empower you, the partner, and to educate you on how to use the extranet, how to capitalize on certain data, use certain strategies to improve your revenue and room nights that you get at your property. But without further ado, let's introduce ourselves quickly. So my name is Declan Scapers. I'm a newly appointed account executive at Booking.com. And as a part of our internship program, we are running this virtual workshop.
So I find it pretty cool that all of you properties are newly opened properties on our platform and we are. newly assigned staff so we kind of all started our journey in booking.com together at the same time. Now I'll turn it over to Taha to introduce himself.
Good morning everyone, my name is Taha, also an account executive with booking.com. We're really super excited to have you all here today and can't wait to get started. Alright, so for today's agenda we're going to be taking you through the whole extranet, just an overview of all the tabs on the extranet and how you can use and then we'll be looking at some reporting procedures and showing you how to mark no-shows and invalid credit cards and how to dispute with our customer service team.
But yeah, let's get into the extranet first. But first and foremost, what is the extranet? So the extranet, and you guys have already used this before, because the extranet is the number one place you come to to set up your property.
So you will set up your property sometimes in collaboration with an account manager, sometimes on your own if you're digitally managed. And it's also a place we can come to see how your business is doing, see how many room nights you're getting, the revenue you're getting on our platform. Sometimes you can read certain data to tell you where you're not doing well and how you can improve on this.
But we're going to go through all the tabs on the extranet to make sure you understand exactly how we can capitalize on the extranet. So let me actually go to it now. I'll just stop sharing my screen for a second and then we'll go right here.
So just a little disclaimer beforehand, this is a test property, meaning that none of the information here is true at all. It is made up. But yeah, let's get straight into it.
So in the extranet, I'll start off by saying the homepage is the most important page in the extranet. You can kind of bounce off the homepage with everything almost. And so we'll be starting off with the homepage first and it will be our last segment, given that it is the most important.
So in the homepage, the first tab you will see is your reservations tab right here. So with your reservations tab, you have arrivals, departures, stayovers and guest requests. Now for arrivals, this is a place you can come to every day to see which guests are arriving at which time, just to make sure that you have staff ready to greet them at the door. And the next one is your departures. So departures is actually a particularly important tab, because if you see that a customer departed on this day, but then they never checked in, Then you mark that as a no-show, but I'm going to show you how to mark a no-show in the reporting procedures later.
And the last one I just want to touch on is your guest requests. Now, oftentimes guests will leave certain requests, recommendations, requirements before they arrive. The most common one we get is just a changing of the arrival time. So the customer was supposed to come at 12, they're already late, they're coming at 5 now.
So you just want to make sure that you can accommodate for all of your guest requests as much as possible. And you want to reply to all of your guest scripts. Now, this is really important because it's going to improve your reply score and your guest review score.
And I'll explain the importance of that later. The next tab, we have your latest reservations for the last 60 days. And then we have your unanswered messages tab, which is a tab that you should keep empty come day in every single day, just to make sure that your reply score is 100%. Now, with your reply score and your review score, so they have, this test property has a...
a really good guest review score of 8 out of 10 and a reply score of 100%. So why are these important? So having a good guest review score and a reply score gives you increased visibility.
With increased visibility, obviously, better rankings. You get reduced cancellations, which is a big one. Increased bookings.
And off the top of my head, yeah, no, just increased bookings. Oh, increased credibility, of course, and higher customer satisfaction. And the next tab we'll touch on here is your demand.
So this test property is located in Las Vegas. So we have four windows that are on the demand for Las Vegas. We have your change in demand, your search window, length of stay and top five countries. Your change in demand is based off the last 14 days, two weeks. So it could say something here like the demand for Las Vegas went up by 4% in the last 14 days, for example.
Your search window is how long in advance do customers... search for properties in your area, Las Vegas, before they book a property in your area. And then you have your average length of stay. what's the length of time do they like to do customers like to stay over at properties in your area and then you have your country demand so obviously we see a 60 or 59 is from america where's that other um demand coming from obviously if you see a certain demand coming from europe or certain areas around the world you really want to target those markets and you can target them with something we have called country rates um which i'll touch on a little bit later and then you have your search performance Not just social performance, your just general performance. So you have your average daily rate, your ADR.
This is on average, how much do you charge customers per night? Then you have your cancellation rates. Now, your cancellation rate is really dependent on your cancellation policies.
So if your cancellation policies are good, your cancellation rate shouldn't be too high. It definitely should not be above the area average. And then you have your revenue and your night state.
Obviously, night state is going to improve when you improve your cancellation rates. And then you have your search performance, search result views. This is how many times your property appears in the search results, your property page views.
And here you have your conversion rate for property page views. So that is basically from the search result views, how many people that see your new search results click onto your property page. For the area, we see that it's 9.35%.
Again, you want this to be as high as your area. And then you have your booking received. And also that will give you like a...
the conversion rate almost of how many people that land on your page actually book with your property all right now that's done we can move on to the next tab rates and availability so we're just going to be going over calendar today so in your calendar this is essentially a place where you can come to mark availability now note that if a guest books with your property on booking.com this will automatically update however if a customer books on another channel Then you need to update. It's physically here unless you have a channel manager such as Knightsbridge, for example. But if you want to, if you have a customer that's booked through another channel and you need to block off certain dates because they're staying in those dates. Let's say, for example, it's the duplex apartment.
You go bulk edit and then you just say from, let's say, the 5th of October, the Thursday to the Sunday. 5th of November and then you could just say room status, close room, save changes and then that's how you mark your availability on our platform. Cool and then now our promotions.
So pretty fun tab. Promotions is a place where you can come to to offer your customers certain deals and I'll just show you the deals that we have on offer which you can use. It's already made deals by the way.
So under your campaign deals we have your late escape deal or It often shows you a getaway deal. The 20% discount that you offer to your customer, which is meant to raise your visibility for a certain period of time and obviously stimulates bookings because of the nature of the discount. And then you have your targeting deals.
So you guys obviously won't get your estate rate because you guys are from Southern Africa, but you have mobile rates and country rates. You can target people that book with their mobile devices or people that are from certain regions, which I mentioned earlier. If you see...
group of customers constantly consistently coming from a certain region you can offer them country rates and mobile rates are really a neat uh thing to implement because most people on a platform i think 66 percent work with their mobile devices so targeting this market is really good because it's really big and then you have your portfolio deals so we have your basic this is the most customizable and flexible deal we currently run on a platform you can customize based on the type of room the rates you wanted to apply for the dates you wanted to apply for. And then you have your last minute deal where you reward last minute bookers and your early booker deal where you reward customers who like to book well in advance. Okay, on to the next tab. So this is your reservations tab.
So this is something you can see every day, again, to see which customers have come in on which dates. You can also come in to see if customers have cancelled or have just not come upon arrival. When that happens, then you need to mark them as a no-show, which will take you through in a bit. Now, for your property. Now, the first thing I'm going to go over is your property pay score.
Now, this is critical for how many people actually click onto your property page. Obviously, so before I actually get into the property pay score, you can fill out all of these performance here that Booking.com tells you to get 100% property pay score. However, think about it. You need to have really good photos in order to allure the customers.
When customers see these photos, they need to think, wow, I want to stay there. Or they need to be impressed in some way. Simply just fulfilling all of these tasks won't just get you great conversion onto your property page.
But again, it is obviously good to fulfill all of these tasks. It's there for a reason. It is going to make your property page score 100% once you've completed all of them.
Now the next thing I'm going to take you through is policies. So remember I said earlier, the key to lowering your cancellation allows us in your policies. Now with your policies, the main ones are your cancellation policies.
Now the two best cancellation policies that work for us are your non-refundable where guests can't cancel for free and you're fully flexible where guests can cancel for free up until X days until arrival. So five, for example. And then also in your policy section, you can have with policies pertaining to whether you accept children, whether you have cribs or extra beds for children, whether you offer child rates, whether you have internet, parking, and you can also come here to display your house rules, for example, no partying past 10, no pets allowed, etc. Okay, now last but definitely not least, probably the most exciting tab is your opportunity center.
So your opportunity center is a place where you can come to, well... the booking.com the extra net will basically tell you areas where you could improve and then it will tell you essentially your problem areas and then how you can improve on this so for example if your property is struggling with visibility it could advise you to join our preferred partner program which increases visibility quite a bit on our platform but yeah that's me i'm the handover to tahas taking you to the rest of the extra net i'll just stop sharing my screen i'll just start sharing mine Two seconds. All right, great. Okay, so now I'll take you through the remaining tabs of the extranet, which is firstly our inbox tab. And under the inbox tab, the first thing we'll be taking a look at is your reservation messages.
So what these are, firstly, it's split up into two sections, your guest and your customer service. So firstly, your guest, this is where you'll receive all your messages from guests who have a reservation with your property, and you can answer them and attend to them here. and it's really important that you answer all of their messages. As you can see, it affects your reply score and having a reply score of 100% just makes your property more attractive to future guests who may book with your property.
So it's always good to have this no unanswered messages displayed here as it means that you're doing a really good job and your reply score will be at 100%. Next is your customer service part of this tab and here you can chat to our customer service base for any issues that you might have with guests. who have reservations on your property. So if you have any issues, reach out to our customer service team here and you can get help.
And then the next part of the inbox tab is your booking.com messages. So what this is, is all the communication between your property yourself and booking.com. So if you need any help, this is the place that you would reach out. In the top right, you can see you can type your question and get a response as fast as possible.
You can also keep track of all the communications that's taken place between us. So if you ever need to refer back to the past where you needed help with a certain situation, you can always refer back to it and get the help again. You'll find it here in this section here.
And lastly, for your inbox tab is your guest Q&A. Now, this is also really important as it also increases the attractiveness of your property for future guests. So this is all messages that you'll receive for your property on the booking.com platform.
Now it can be from guests who aren't booked with you and simply just have a question about a room type or something about your property's facilities. It's really important to answer these as well as it also increases attractiveness for future guests as I just said. But that is your inbox tab. We'll next take a look at your guest reviews with the first part being your actual guest reviews. So in the top here you can see your overall review score and how many reviews it's based on.
And if you scroll a little further down you can see a graph that depicts how many reviews you're getting per review score. Now we want it to be as high as possible so if your highest frequency is on a 10 rating that is amazing as it will just increase your overall score and a better review score improves your bookings as your property looks more attractive to guest booking on our platform. Now you can see the overview as well as categories so if you click on categories button you can see how guests are reviewing your property based on each category so here you can identify areas that you're not performing as well as others. and improve on those to just cater to your guests better, give them a better guest experience, and entice them to book with your property in the future. Now if you scroll further down, you can also see the individual guest reviews.
So this property is a test, therefore there's only one here, but you can see each guest's review, what they rated you on each factor that makes up the overall score, and you can see what they didn't like, what they liked, and you can possibly pick up trends from this and then cater to guests better in the future. And if you scroll right to the bottom, you can see what's negatively impacting your review score. And if you click on the learn more button, it will just take you to a page with some advice on how you can improve your score to get better results on our platform. And lastly, you can also see your progress.
There isn't enough data available at this point, but if you see this tab on your property, you can just see how you're performing from the past to the future and see what you're doing well and what you're not and take corrective action as needed. And lastly for the guest reviews is your guest experience. So what this is, is our machine learning goes through all your properties comments that are left there.
And for the last three months, we highlight the most popular topics that come up. And we then display these to you so you can just better understand what your guests are feeling, what they like, what they didn't like, and then cater to them better in the future. So that's your guest reviews tab. We'll now take a look at the finance tab with the first section being our invoices.
So with our invoices, you can see all your outstanding balances with the period that it's for. So you can see what you owe Booking.com. It's just nice to keep track of this as you know what you owe. And then you can also see if you scroll further down what you've already paid.
So you know exactly where your money is going and how the process works. Next for the finance tab is your reservation statements. So this is where you'll see each individual reservation with a unique booking number. You'll see the guest's name, the check-in and check-out date, the room night that they stayed, the commission that was applied, and all the final amounts that were paid.
So this is just good to understand. a reservation better. And if you ever need to dispute a reservation, this is where you'd come.
You'd click on this unique number. You take it to the page where you can then dispute or lock any actions per that guest's booking. Next is your financial overview.
Now, your financial overview is basically just a graph that gives you a breakdown of how your revenue is split up between your gross revenue and your commission per day of the month. So you can just get a breakdown, which shows you a nice graph. a nice graphical display how your property is doing for the entire month and if you see it's performing better in certain periods of the month you can then dive deeper into that period and see what was working well there and apply to the rest of the month to increase your performance. Now next for the finance is your financial settings.
So this is where you would just set up all your finance details, your banking details. If you're on direct debits this is where you will set up which account it must come from. If you are an online payment, this is how you would just pick your preferred payout method. And then lastly is your general finance.
If you'd like to change your invoice info, this is the place you can do so. You can just have all your property details here and you can change it as needed. For the finance tab, there's also something I just want to quickly mention.
It's the getting paid section. Now, this is for a program called Payments by Booking and it's offered by Booking.com. where we handle all your payments for your property. But we will be taking you through this in depth in an upcoming webinar. So definitely stick around for that as it's really important and helps your property a lot.
But that's your finance tab. Now let's take a look at what I find the most interesting tab is your analytics dashboard. So your analytics dashboard provides you data of how your property is performing over a period of time.
So firstly, what you'll see is your pace reports. Now this is just basically all the upcoming bookings that are on. for your property. So you can see your trajectory, how you're performing for the upcoming months, and see if you need to take corrective action to boost sales for those upcoming months if you see that the bookings are not there.
Further down, if you scroll, you can see your sales statistics, and this is just a report of all your past bookings up until the current date. So you can see how you're performing based on your room nights for this year compared to last year. You can also see your ADR for this year and last year and then compare. what was working well, what wasn't, and then take corrective action as needed.
You can also see your booker inside. So this just gives you an idea of where your bookers are. So here you can see that a lot of your travelers are coming from Netherlands.
Last year, most of them were coming from Spain. And you can see this has kind of switched around and you can then dive deeper into why this is the case and then possibly implement a country rate to bring back your Spanish market for this year as well. And if you scroll, the last graph that you'll see is your booker window info. And this is just how long in advance to the actual stay date guests are searching and booking your property.
So this is really cool as you can implement promotions that Declan mentioned earlier, such as your last minute book a deal or your early book a deal. If you see that the booker window will support that. So that's a little bit of your analytics.
Now, what's really cool also about the analytics section is your competitive set. And it's something that I advise all of you to do. So firstly, on the left hand side, you'll see your calculated competitive set. And these are the properties that we suggest because they're similar to yours and perform in the same manner.
And on the right hand side is your competitive set. And this is where you can pick 10 properties that you feel are your direct competitors and are similar to your property. Now, why this is really important is it feeds into your ranking dashboard. And if we take a look at your ranking dashboard, it basically just shows you how your property is converting from your search results views to your property page views to your bookings receipt.
And here you can always see that you compare your property to the area average. So you can see how your property is performing better or worse than your competitors. And then you can see which areas you need to take corrective action in.
So here you can see that the review score, the area average is 7.8 and yours is 8, meaning that you're above average and you're doing really well and you need to keep it this way. It's always important to be either at area average or above area average as it means your property will be performing really well. And then lastly you can just see how your performance has changed for the last 90 days or you can change it to the year and compare your performance and just see where you were doing well, why you were doing well and then apply to the current period. But yeah that is your extranet overview in a nutshell.