A payout is not your revenue

When an OTA pays you, the bank statement shows one line: a date, a reference and an amount. Behind that amount sit a dozen or more stays, each with its own sell rate, commission and discount, plus deductions that belong to none of them. Nothing on the statement says which.

So the question every hotel eventually asks — did we get paid what we were owed? — cannot be answered from the bank. It can only be answered by rebuilding the transfer, booking by booking, from the OTA's own screens.

What one transfer is made of

Take a month of checkouts on one OTA. Guests paid a total; a smaller amount reached your account. The gap is not just commission:

• Commission at your contract rate — the deduction everyone expects.
• Cancellations from an earlier period, adjusted against this month's money rather than the month they happened in.
• Discounts you funded. Some promotions are paid for by the OTA; others come out of your share. The booking screen rarely says which.
• Tax withheld at source, where the law requires it.
• A commission base you did not expect — commission charged on more than the room price you had in mind.

Each of these is small on its own. Together they are the difference between "the OTA paid us" and "the OTA paid us what we were owed".

Some money leaves with no booking attached

The deductions that cost the most time are the ones that belong to no stay at all:

• an amount taken off a transfer for a customer complaint, with no booking, guest or reason beside it;
• a no-show re-invoiced after the night it concerns;
• a clawback that appears only as a negative line on a later payout.

None of these shows up on a screen that lists bookings. You only find them by adding up the bookings in a transfer and noticing that the total does not match.

Advertising arrives in three different places

Agoda, Booking.com and Goibibo / MakeMyTrip each charge for visibility or for handling payments, and each takes that charge out of your money in a different way:

• Booking.com lists its payments service fee as a named line on its invoice.
• Goibibo / MakeMyTrip nets a Sponsored Listing charge against a booking's settlement, as an adjustment.
• Agoda charges its visibility programme as a higher commission on the bookings it promoted. A row at a rate above your contract is the only sign that the programme was running.

The first is easy to find. The second needs you to open the adjustment. The third needs you to know your contract rate and check every row against it.

The OTA's own screens can disagree

It would be convenient if an OTA's statement, its export and its payment advice always agreed. They usually do. Sometimes they do not:

• a transfer whose lines add up to slightly more than the transfer itself — consistently, in the statement, the export and the signed remittance advice;
• a booking marked "settled, nothing due" that settled for less than the payable it stated;
• a campaign page whose cost does not match the commission actually deducted.

When the OTA's own documents disagree, there is one record that is not the OTA's: your bank statement. Every reconciliation should end there.

Why this takes days by hand

To check one month on one OTA, you need the bookings, the payouts they were paid in, the invoices, the adjustments and the bank statement — each on a different screen, each in a different format, and many bookings to one payout. Then do it again for the next OTA, whose words mean different things.

Hotels that do this by hand commonly put it at three to five staff days a month. Most simply don't, and trust the transfer.

What to check each month

• The bank credit matches the OTA's payout total for the same reference.
• The bookings in that payout add up to the payout — and if they don't, find the line that explains the difference.
• Each booking's commission is at your contract rate. A higher rate is a programme you are paying for.
• Every deduction without a booking has a document behind it.