When an OTA booking arrives

It lands on the chart by itself, at the OTA price. What cannot be applied waits on a list with the reason.

A booking sold on an OTA reaches us within seconds and is on the chart in the same second, with a room number where one is free.

Do this

1. Arrivals waiting — received, not on the chart. Each row says why: a mapping that does not exist, a guest already in house, a change in the number of rooms.
2. Apply everything waiting — after fixing the cause.
3. Everything they have sent us — every request the channel manager has made, taken or not, with what we answered.
4. Only what we did not take — narrows the list to refusals.
5. Pending allotment — a booking that arrived when the type was full. The sale stands; it has no room number yet.
6. Place everyone who can be placed — once a room has freed.

Under OTAs and logins, each OTA's extranet login is kept encrypted for the person who has to log in there: the OTA, their code for this hotel, whether it is live, the username and password, and Save.

Things worth knowing:

• The price is the channel's, not yours. It is recorded as sent and cannot be edited at the desk. That is deliberate — the guest has already paid the OTA.
• An oversell is still booked. If the hotel is full, the booking is created anyway and flagged. The guest holds a confirmation either way; an oversell you can see beats one discovered at check-in.
• Waiting for a room — a booking with no free room of its type keeps its room type and joins the pending allotment list. It is placed automatically, in arrival order, as soon as one frees up.
• A cancellation cancels the rooms it created.

Two cases are handed to a person rather than guessed: a booking whose number of rooms changed, and a cancellation for a guest already in house. Both appear on Arrivals waiting with the reason in words.

Since September 2026

• On the chart in the same second. The booking is placed in the request that delivers it, not by a timer two minutes later. A row that reads *waiting* could not be placed — the hotel was full for that type — and says so.
• The tax is read too. The channel's stated tax is kept beside its gross and net, and the card shows Room charges, GST and a Total that includes it. A channel that states its tax as zero (Agoda) is quoting a GST-inclusive price, and the night is posted as base plus tax adding up to the channel's figure.
• A shared address is not a person. OTAs send their own email on every booking. A guest is matched on Aadhaar or PAN, or on email or phone *only when the name agrees*; otherwise it is a new guest, and the old record is not overwritten. Before this, every Agoda guest became the first Agoda guest ever seen.
• The hotel can read what was sent. Operations → CM Log is one row per booking the channel delivered, with its fate. See What the channel sent, and what became of it.
• The guest who paid the OTA is settled to the OTA's account at check-in and owes the desk nothing — see the desk topic of that name.