Booking.com Request to Book

Booking.com’s “Request to Book” is a feature that changes the usual instant booking process into a property manager's approval system. Normally, guests on Booking.com can instantly confirm a reservation — no approval needed. However, with Request to Book, each reservation becomes a pending request that the property manager must manually accept or decline within a set timeframe (24 hours).

You can enable the Request to Book setting for your Booking.com listings directly through Homhero. Please note that while you can switch a listing from Request to Book to Instant Book, this change is permanent — you won’t be able to revert back to Request to Book once it’s updated.

How Request to Book works in Homhero

1. The guest submits a booking request for their chosen dates and property.
2. The property manager will receive the booking request in the Homhero Dashboard. You can also access each booking request via the Booking Engine > RTB Bookings page.
3. Within Homhero, the property manager can Accept or Decline the request — this action must be completed within 24 hours.
4. Once the property manager responds, the guest will then receive a notification to Accept or Decline the booking on their end, also within 24 hours.
5. If either the property manager or the guest declines or fails to respond within the timeframe, the booking request will automatically expire.
   
   
   
   

How to accept a booking request
New requests can be accepted directly from the Homhero Dashboard. Please see the below steps:

1. Locate the Booking.com Reservation Request and click the arrow on the left to open and review the Guest Information.
2. If you’re happy to accept the request, click the tick icon on the right to approve it.
   
   
    
   
    
3. Click the checkbox to acknowledge the booking request. You can view Booking.com's non-discrimination policy here.
4. Click Confirm.
   
   
    
5. The status will change to Pending Guest, giving the guest up to 24 hours to accept the booking request.
   
   
    
6. Once the guest has accepted, the booking request will update to confirmed.
   
   

How to setup your Listing as Request to Book
Your listing is typically configured as either Instant Book or Request to Book during your onboarding with Homhero. However, when creating a new listing within Homhero, the default setting is Instant Book. If you prefer to use Request to Book, you’ll need to update this during the onboarding process. This will feed through to your website and all OTA's including Booking.com.

Please follow the below steps:

1. Open Booking Engine and select Listings from the Homhero side menu.
2. Double click on the listing or click the Edit Pencil to open it.
   
   
    
3. Under the Details tab, locate the Booking Type setting and update this to Request to Book.
4. Click Save on the listing.
   
   

Pushing the Request to Book listing to Booking.com
When you are ready to publish your listing to Booking.com, the same process applies as an Instant Book listing. Please note that Request to Book can only be enabled for new Booking.com listings.

1. Click Booking Engine > Listings from the Homhero side menu.
2. Select a listing by clicking the 'grey' Booking.com Icon visible under the Web/OTA column.
   
   
    
3. Complete all Booking.com settings accross the Details, Booking Settings, Pricing and Availability tabs. The Hotel and Room ID should be left blank as this will generate automatically once the listing has been created.
4. Click Save & Publish.
   
   Note: Whilst the listing is awaiting approval, the Booking.com icon will show as yellow to represent the Pending status . It typically takes around 10–15 minutes for the listing to finish building on Booking.com before it goes live through Homhero.
   
   
    
5. Once published and the listing is Live, the Booking.com Icon will show as green to represent the Active status .
   
   

For more information on the Booking.com Listing Settings, please view our article here.