Curious how they need a 10 day outage on the outbound payment side, but not the inbound payment side which must be significantly more complex!
Outbound, they're paying into bank accounts (more complex), in many different countries with different protocols for bank transfers, with significant reporting and auditing requirements, invoicing, etc. Also paying on different timescales for different things – whether bulk purchasing inventory, paying for on-demand bookings, etc. Payment terms will vary by many factors including who the payee is. Some payees like large chains may have their own accounting systems that need to be integrated with.
I'd have generally assumed that outbound would be much more complex!
A few thoughts as a non expert:
They might take thousands of bookings for a single hotel, so the volume of inbound payments is significantly more.
Public facing payments have to operate 24/7.
They have to deal with fraud and bad actors.
Transactions need to be real time rather than batch.
They need to support all kinds of international payments.
They have to take payments over web, mobile and call centres.
They have to support PCI and GDPR compliance on the customer side.
I’m sure neither side is easy at their scale, but B2C sounds much trickier to me even though there are opportunities to outsource on both sides.
It may be complex, but they only give hotels 5 days for reconciliation, and won't accept any changes after 5 days.
Booking.com just started now. They just started this year where guest pays to booking.com and they send it to the hotels. Until last year, they didn't collect payment from the guest.
The interesting thing is... what's with the hosts who get into financial difficulties after 10 days of delayed payments. I get it that three years of a pandemic, the consequences of the Ruzzian war, and inflation have been a drain on everyone's reserves - but not even ten days of runway? Holy shit.
> payments for guests checking out from June 28 would be delayed and all paid out in one go on July 24.
That said, it sounds like payments are normally delayed by 10 days from checkout.
Of course, apparently some payments "could be delayed until August", so all I can say with authority is that this is a mess.
Why are they robbing the little guys, what is going on with their cash flow? A switchover can happen overnight, with the right planning, there should be no need to delay payments by 3 months!
They had a pretty bad loss two quarters ago:
"Net income was $266 million, compared with a net loss of $700 million in the prior-year quarter"
https://s201.q4cdn.com/865305287/files/doc_financials/2023/q...
Please visit this group in FB which was created to register all the concerns from hosts and guests from all over the world. We can collectively work together to fix this situation. https://m.facebook.com/groups/1316864141779135/
Poor tech + poor timing. Take off the tinfoil hats.
Also, from a quick search, Booking seems to be doing fine financially.
Basically, they can just down outbound payments for 10 days and not really lose any business. For most places it's probably not going to be that much of a problem they need to wait 10 days for a payment. If you can do something and it makes your life easiler why not?