The channel manager sells your rooms on Booking.com, Expedia, and Google Hotels and keeps them in sync. Availability, rates, and restrictions flow out continuously, and bookings, changes, and cancellations flow in within moments of the guest acting on the booking site. You manage it under Settings → Sales Channels.
Getting connected
Channel distribution is enabled per account, so ask SERVOS to switch it on. Once enabled, Settings → Sales Channels walks you through it:
- Connect to channel manager creates your property in the channel manager from your organization details and mirrors your accommodations.
- Add Channel connects a booking site. Pick the channel, enter the property id from the OTA's extranet, choose a fee tax group (used for things like cancellation fees from that channel), then map each of the OTA's rooms and rates to one of your accommodations. Rows you leave unmapped are skipped.
Each channel shows a status, "Not connected", "Live", or "Paused", and can be paused (Disable), resumed, re-mapped, or removed from its row menu. The settings side is covered in Sales channels.
What syncs out
For every accommodation published on your channels, SERVOS pushes:
- Availability, free rooms per date, updated whenever a booking, cancellation, room change, or room block changes the picture. Room blocks reduce OTA inventory too, so blocking a room protects it from OTA bookings.
- Rates, the nightly price computed from your base rate and the pricing rules that apply to that booking site (rules for all channels, and rules that name it), which is how OTA markups work. Stay-length pricing rules aren't included, because booking sites receive nightly rates. Set length-of-stay discounts on the booking site itself if you want them there.
- Restrictions, stop-sells and minimum/maximum stay rules that apply to that booking site, the same way.
Changes push within about a minute, with a full re-sync every night covering roughly 500 days ahead.
How OTA bookings arrive
A booking on a channel becomes an order with one stay per room booked, marked with the channel's name and an "OTA Reference". Modifications and cancellations made on the booking site flow in the same way.
A few things to know:
- Overbookings are accepted. If no room is free, the stay arrives without a room and the stay page shows a "Missing Room" alert. Assign a room when one opens up. Until then it still counts against the availability sent to booking sites.
- Guest emails are relays. Booking sites hide the guest's real address behind a relay, so SERVOS doesn't send pre-arrival registration emails to OTA guests. They register at the desk; see Guest registration.
- OTA cancellations never get your cancellation fee on top. If the channel retained an amount, it appears on the order as a cancellation fee line.
What works differently on OTA bookings
The booking site owns the commercial terms, so in SERVOS:
- Dates can't be changed. Date changes happen on the booking site. Moving the stay to another room is fine.
- Pricing is taken as-is from the channel and never recalculated.
- The order can't be cancelled from the order page. Cancellations come from the channel.
- An unpaid OTA order is normal and expected (see payment below), and check-out won't warn about it.
Getting paid: guarantee cards
Channels guarantee bookings with a card, often a virtual card. SERVOS stores it securely and charges it once the stay's check-in date has passed, or when the booking is cancelled with an amount retained. You can also charge manually from Guarantee Card Charges under Orders, where upcoming automatic charges are listed with their scheduled date. On the order page, a pending charge shows as "Upcoming".
Common questions
A guest booked on Booking.com and wants different dates. Ask them to change the booking on Booking.com, or change it from your extranet. The update flows into SERVOS by itself.
Why is this OTA order unpaid? That's the normal state until the guarantee card is charged after check-in. Nothing to chase.
The prices on the booking site don't match my base rate. Check the pricing rules that apply to that booking site. A markup rule for it is usually the difference, and that's by design. For longer stays, a stay-length discount can also make your own booking site cheaper than the OTA, since those discounts don't reach booking sites.
