Tokeet - the channel manager that will corrupt your bookings and abandon you when you have a problem

[Hugh0]

So, a few weeks ago I subscribed to a channel manager called Tokeet. I wanted to try other channels for my listings.

I have five apartment listings, have hosted over 1500 happy trips and have over 900 reviews.

I chose a channel manager called Tokeet. It promised to be simple and reliable. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the case.

Starting on Tokeet is a bit like setting up a modem. Despite the fact we have little information to input besides our calendar URLS, Tokeet manages to make the process extremely difficult. Checking the connections, checking your rates and any other form of checking is extremely difficult. Nothing is intuitive or user friendly. No simple stoplight sort of GUI that lets you know how you got on. No report you can print to check all the settings between the listings and the channels. Nothing user friendly. Just drill down, trial and error, trial and error - then repeat. Expect trouble.

I also recommend that you do not subscribe for a year. You won't be refunded and you won't want to use it after your bookings have been corrupted.

So, I climbed the steep learning curve and got it to work. Hours and hours invested in learning how they want to do things, not how a user might expect to find things - a good example is the app - it does not even default to the current date so you can check what is happening today. I accepted these limitations and trained myself to use it......then yesterday happened.

Yesterday I was expecting a guest for, lets say Apartment A. The booking was in Tokeet. My housekeeper used the app to tell her which apartment to make up. We stocked the Apartment. Then, when the apartment was ready, I went to message the guest that Apartment A was ready. I looked at the Airbnb app to send the message, and noticed that the booking was for Apartment B. OMG - how can this happen. A review of my bookings found another corrupted booking to.

So I messaged Tokeet. Absolutely no help. The following day they said they would contact Airbnb. Why, I don't know. The reason I don't know is that they won't tell me anything:

How many of my bookings have been corrupted by Tokeet? No reply. 

How long does it typically take to get a response from Airbnb? No reply

The booking shows correctly in Airbnb. Your platform has it wrong. Why do you need to ask Airbnb? No reply

Can you phone me to discuss? Asked about 12 times before a No response was received

Can someone senior get on this message thread to reply. No reply

So, here I sit, 24 hours after finding my first corrupted booking in Tokeet, none the wiser except to say do not use Tokeet. Hit your thumb repeatly with a hammer. At least it will feel better after you stop.

If anyone has any experience with a simple channel manager that actually works, please let us know

[Branka-and-Silvia0]

@Hugh0

Tnx for sharing your experience.

We are listed on 2 booking sites only and just one of them is IB. I  can't and won't manage more , it is to complicated.

We have just 3 listings (2 units) I rely on my old school pocket calendar and take it everywhere I go 🙂 I love pen and paper as I don't depend of WiFi , batteries or electricity.  I don't trust Tokeet and similar services.

[Joao128]

I have tested tokeet, and unfortunally I have imported all my proprieties into tokeet wihout knowing that

1. I would no longer be able to use airbnb management system because all i has to be done through the channel manager.

2. my bookings and blocked dates manually added in airbnb were gone in both the airbnb and tokeet.

I am feeling that I will have to go to paper and pen and emails to refind all the bookings.

Waiting for reply from tokeet, but I bet that my next post will be in other terms using words hat will put me in the hell of dante......

[Eddie57]

Do not use Tokeet. Was a disaster when prices and configuration were changed automatically!

[Kate-Mary0]

What a pain. It's hard enough to juggle everything without a tool that's supposed to help you making things worse! I don't really know Tokeet I'm afraid (maybe that's a good thing)!

I find AirGMS useful (I like freebie's and it's free to use if you have 4 or fewer properties to list), you can do quite a bit on there like schedule cleaning and maintenance, organize your bookings and pricing, and set up templates to automate communication. The best bit for me is that I can sync my calendar from a number of platforms. If you decide to move to a new property management tool have a look:https://www.airgms.com/features/  It might be helpful? 

Best of luck going forward. 

[Jonathan153]

We trialled iGMS, formerly AirGMS, for about 8 months and it was riddled with problems and costed us hundreds in lost bookings due to date blocking and double bookings. It depends on the intensity of movement of bookings and how many other OTA channels you use (iGMS only connects to AirBnB and HomeAway by direct API connection, everything else will be the unreliable iCal connections). If you sell on Booking.com or practically any other channel except Homeaway then you will get double bookings and the system won't tell you about it. When they finally enabled double bookings to show up it was working and then they then sent out an update which wiped away the feature that displays double bookings.  Additionally we found that AirGMS calendar app was repeatedly blocking dates on Booking.com and labelling them as blocked by AirBnB, when investigated it turned out that it wasn't them but AirGMS. The support at first was polite when I was speaking with the CTO however when dealing with customer support they didn't even bother to read my emails and see the screenshots I'd sent them. It was like talking to a brick wall. The CTO promised us heavily subsidised fees until Booking.com integration was complete in approx 6 months, but then when we decided to move away from them as we kept getting double bookings they conveniently forgot their past promises of discounts. On the whole if you operate more than one property on different platforms I would advise against using them. Also it is free for 4 listings or less not 4 properties.

[Jenny-and-Tom0]

Kate, Don't you work for IGMS?  Spam?

[Tacina0]

Any Superhosts recommend any Chanel managers ? When you have to like we do in London with a 90 day restriction ? Many thanks 

[Roula1]

We've been using Syncbnb for a couple of years and never experienced the problems described above. They don't have many features (like unified inbox or website builder) but the rest works flawlessly.

[Renee299]

DISASTER!

[Peter1742]

Hi,

Tokeet cost me 15.000 euros/17.000 USD due to a technical problem with their recently launched version 2.0

For the past five years I have not had more than a couple of days unbooked during the two peak season months of July and August, this summer I've had 15 available days due to cancelled bookings (cancelled well in advance) not being considered by Tokeet, basically listing them as active and confirmed.

Tokeet blames this on Booking.com, something that Booking.com do not agree with at all. I honestly trust Booking.com over Tokeet which just have a few years of history. Hopefully Booking.com will grow tired of Tokeet and prevent them from connecting to their platform. I've kept them updated about the situation and provided screenshots of my conversations with Tokeet to prove how they point their finger at Booking.com.

Tokeet has an appealing design and good prices but it comes at a cost, in my case it cost me 15.000 euros. Even if I had chosen the most expensive channel manager and a McKinsey consultant to manage it it would have been less costly than using Tokeet.

Among many promises Tokeet writes on this site that "Tokeet keeps all your channels automatically and instantly updated with the latest rates and availability", and "... your listings are always accurate". Well, they are always accurate until they are not.

Tokeet is conveniently located in the Bahamas so forget about taking any legal actions or pay them a visit. That is probably also why they don't invest many more minutes into a critical matter like mine than simply state that they are not responsible for such losses.

If I didn't know better I would thing that I talked to a Tokeet bot, the lack of interest and responsibility is profound. Tokeet cost me my season, they offer a nice design and great prices but for a good reason, their technology is not tested and at the end their users will pay the price.

The hunt for a better channel manager than Tokeet has started so far I've begun testing Booking Automation, which seems promising so far. 

[Yong-Long0]

how have you found booking automation? I'm looking into that right now.

it seems promising, but not sure why it's not well known...

[Peter1742]

Hi,

What exactly do you mean about your question regarding booking automation? In my experience I would absolutely not count on Tokeet handling anything automatically, their system is full of bugs and their customer service basically non existing.

After having searched the market for alternatives to Tokeet, and even more importantly, making a list of my actual needs, I narrowed it down to a software called Smoobu.

Lots of channel manager software solutions offer and charge for a lot of features that are not really needed by the average Host. Make sure that you know what you actually need, and pay for just that.

[Glenn215]

Dear current, former, and potential Tokeet customers,

I joined Tokeet as the VP of Client Services in August and after reading of this situation, my team and I did some investigating.   I personally reviewed conversations (chat transcripts) with a customer in July who claimed a cancellation from Booking.com was not reflected in the Tokeet system, causing a vacancy worth 15,000 Euros.  I can confirm that several of our most senior support personnel participated in these conversations, investigated the case, and could not find a cancellation record for this property and period, processed or not.  The customer claims Booking.com would have participated in resolving this problem if only they had a screenshot of an unprocessed record. How could we share proof of a record we never got? We were being asked to prove a negative.  In addition, if we could prove we received such a record, it would also prove Booking.com sent it, so I’m not sure how much help they’d have been.

We agree that the accurate coordination of property bookings between channels is of utmost importance.  It is both one of the most important services we provide and one of the most difficult to accomplish. Every channel has a proprietary system to access, as well as a unique set of requirements in terms of how they define their data (ex:  How to deliver requests for additional guests, what fields comprise a rental definition, and so on). Coordinating the data between all these different systems in a very young industry for software is a challenge, and I’m not going to pretend that errors never happen.  But what I will say is that the problem in question was taken very seriously and responded to quickly and frequently, not to mention politely.

I will also share that Tokeet does this coordination in real-time  for thousands and thousands of properties every minute of every day.  We manage over 17,000 rental property bookings (all channels) and process 1500 cancellations from Booking.com successfully in a typical week.  If we had regular problems of this nature, we would not only lose customers at a much higher rate than our extremely low churn statistic indicates, we would not have retained this customer for the multiple years he cites.  

It saddens me that this happened at all, not only from an accuracy point of view, but because nobody wins.  I can understand why he would want us to cover his opportunity loss just as he can probably understand that we cannot provide make-goods for every customer who claims a loss.  But I took up his case in a quest to find fault with the Company I only recently joined and I could not find any.

I hope this response clears up any questions you dear readers may have.

[Hugh0]

Your software and your service is crap.

Help is non existent.

Look for a new job. You will need it soon.