TA/HL Subscription Owners Alert!

OTA = Online Travel Agency, which means those sites that sell the booking and take the payment for you.
Yorkshire Lass
Posts: 201
Joined: Mon Sep 06, 2010 2:08 pm
Location: North Yorkshire
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TA/HL Subscription Owners Alert!

Post by Yorkshire Lass »

I have 3 houses on subscription with TA/HL and received a slightly vague email from them announcing some changes the other day and informing me that when the first one comes up for renewal at the end of January I would still have the option of being on subscription but at the higher cost of £599 plus VAT and with some new terms and conditions but to call them to discuss if I had any questions. I did call them and having had one fairly unsatisfactory conversation with one person who didn't seem to know the ins and outs of this subsequently got a call back from Veronica who clearly did. The main point that subscription owners may not be aware of (and is not spelled out in the vague announcement email they send out) is that after this point TA/HL will no longer be offering 'direct reimbursement' ie if you use their online booking system (which I currently do) you will no longer receive the deposit and balance payments immediately - they will only be paid to you after the guest has checked in!! So you will be paying £599 plus VAT only for them to bank large amounts of your money for potentially long periods of time. Here's the relevant quote from Veronica's subsequent email:

'The Direct Reimbursement, where you accept an online booking and the payment is received into PayPal right away, will cease to exist at the end of January, this tool is no longer available with the subscription, so the subscription will have one less tool. I highly recommend the Free Listing, and if you are happy to switch to Free Listing today, I can issue you with a pro-rata refund - let me know you are interested and make sure to update your Payout settings, you can use a bank account or a PayPal account.

Also, I can confirm that the online booking system will continue as normal for any existing bookings that you have already confirmed, we are not going to change any existing bookings, they will run as normal.'

As Veronica told me you can still opt for no online bookings but the consequence of this is that you will be at the bottom of their listings. Obviously what they really want is for all owners to join the commission scheme so they can pocket 3% commission from owners and a further 9-16% from the guests.

Neither option is attractive to me now so will have to decide what to do before January...[/b][/u]
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