GillianF wrote: Every booking this year has been 'difficult'. Guests not replying to e-mails, changing e-mail addresses, guests paying by bank transfer with no name or date reference to identify themselves. General lack of communication....
Yesterday evening we get a panic e-mail and phone call that they have paid £1,000 too much by bank transfer and can we send it back asap. They have paid "£2,280 instead of £1,280".
...... but I am almost speechless at a seemingly cavalier attitude to transferring money
We have noticed that guest communication is getting even worse than it used to be. Just received our first booking via BC and emailed the guests a few weeks ago to ask them to transfer €200 security deposit plus tourist tax to our bank account. No reply and no transfer received. If it's not forthcoming, I have an idea that we're going to have an interesting conversation when they arrive, something along the lines of 'Didn't have to pay a security deposit when we last booked a night at the Holiday Inn through Booking.com'.....
About your over-payment, we are also completely shocked at how careless people can be with transferring money.
We have received all kinds of strange amounts over the years and they can be so frustrating to have to entangle sometimes. Often guests seem to type in the figure in the incorrect order - such as, 1450 instead of 1540 or they just decide to round the deposit amount up or down (normally down) to an amount which they decide - such as 250 instead of 257.
Last year, we had a booking from the UK from a very scatty family who got in a real mess with their payments. They decided long after paying the deposit to add an extra night. I updated their invoice and when it became time to pay the balance payment, we received first the entire full amount of the adjusted booking (so, including the deposit which they had already paid) and then the next day, a second payment which was the original balance payment before the extra night had been added. Both payments came from different bank accounts. Neither had any date or surname note. Both bank accounts couldn't be matched to any lead booking name we held. We identified the payments only because we were expecting a balance payment around that date from the UK.
I ended up transferring some GBP900 back to them and they didn't even realize that they had made an error until I emailed them about it....