Our outdoor hospitality specialist, Deb Kohls, regularly organizes webinars for our campground and RV park users. The last webinar was on November 5th and the topic was: Marketing with Booking.com. 

Panelists for this webinar were:

- Axel De Jesus Gonzalez, Special Projects Account Manager, Booking.com
- Beronica Garcia, Vacation Rentals Account Manager, Booking.com
- Deb Kohls, Outdoor Industry Business Development, Frontdesk Anywhere

Booking.com is a major Online Travel Agency. We consequently wished to conduct a webinar to explain how campgrounds and RV parks can get more involved with Booking.com.

The webinar started with a reminder of the Booking.com’s mission: “To help leisure & business travelers, whatever their budget, easily discover, book, and enjoy the world’s best places to stay.”

Booking.com was founded in 1996 in The Netherlands and has become in less than two decades the world’s leading online accommodations site by room nights sold.

Here are some key figures:

- More than 700,000 room nights are booked every day
- Website currently in 42 languages
- More than 540,000 hotel partners in over 205 countries
- More than 38.5 million guest reviews

It’s important to point out that the reviews are written by customers who booked their stay via Booking.com and who stayed in the properties. This is a big difference from other travel and review websites. Reviews are unique and cannot be written if a person never stayed in your property.

The top reasons to work with Booking.com are:

- The opened agreement
- The commission-based model
- The 24 hour customer service in over 42 languages
- The fact that guests pay the property directly
- The massive web marketing at no cost

The guest speakers then highlighted the Booking Genius loyalty program. The purpose is to connect Booking.com most loyal guests to the top properties.

The key advantages of this program are:

- Priority visibility: Genius properties are ranked at top of search results
- Extra marketing with the Genius tagging
- Higher conversion

Another interesting way to sell more guestrooms is the Closed User Group Deal or Secret Deal. Offers are only available for registered Booking.com users. This feature enables properties to fill up their low demand and last minute dates in hours, to reach millions of customers and to offer flexible discount with full control over inventory.

To connect to Booking.com, you can use Frontdesk Anywhere Property Management System (PMS). Once you have contacted Booking.com and signed up with them, Frontdesk Anywhere customer success team helps connect with Booking.com. Lastly, your Frontdesk Anywhere account enables you to manage rates and inventory from one single platform and to avoid double bookings.