Managing OTA Rates & Restrictions

Users of the RoomBoss Channel Manager can link RoomBoss rate plans to OTAs. This allows the management of rates for agents, directs and OTAs from a single page inside RoomBoss.

Setup

Any existing plans can be linked but it is also possible to create new derived plan(s) with a difference in pricing and link these.

You can see more on setting up derived plans here.

OTA Specific Connection Notes

Booking.com

• Supports multiple plans per room type.

• Properties must be set to use Occupancy Based Pricing, RoomBoss can update this setting in booking.com on your behalf.

• RoomBoss will push rates for all occupancy levels from base to max.

• Supported Restrictions at the night level (values set for each night will feed through to the OTA): Closed, Closed to Arrival, Closed to Arrival, Min Length of Stay, Max Length of Stay, Max advance and Min Advance.

• MinLOS restrictions will be capped based on the property’s Booking.com settings (default maximum is 30 days unless the property has enabled long stays). See here for more information: https://partner.booking.com/en-us/help/understanding-long-stay-policies

• If a MinLOS value exceeding the allowed limit is pushed, Booking.com will silently adjust it to what is allowed without returning any warning or error.

Expedia

• Supports multiple plans per room type.

• Properties must be set to use Occupancy Based Pricing, please ask Expedia support to set this.

• RoomBoss will push rates for all occupancy levels from base to max.

• Supported Restrictions at the night level (values set for each night will feed through to the OTA): Closed, Closed to Arrival, Closed to Arrival, Min Length of Stay and Max Length of Stay.

• Supported Restrictions at the rate plan level (values set on the rate plan will feed through to the OTA): Max advance and Min Advance.

Airbnb

• Supports multiple plans per room type.

• RoomBoss will push rates for all occupancy levels from base to max.

• Supported Restrictions at the night level (values set for each night will feed through to the OTA): Closed, Closed to Arrival, Closed to Arrival, Min Length of Stay and Max Length of Stay.

• Supported Restrictions at the rate plan level (values set on the rate plan will feed through to the OTA): Max advance and Min Advance.

Please note, while Airbnb will allow choosing Strict 30 and Strict 60 policies on rate plans in your account. selecting these cancellation policies will mean:

• It will be possible to book these rate plans from outside of Japan, Korea, Hungary and Singapore and bookings will reflect these policies

• These rate plans will not display for users within Japan, Korea, Hungary and Singapore on some browsers and it will not be possible to book

As such we do not recommend selecting Strict 30 or Strict 60 policies on properties in Japan, Korea, Hungary or Singapore.

Airbnb also has a legacy API which allows only a single rate plans and supports only the rate for base occupancy. Please contact us if you would like to be upgraded to the newer API or use the legacy API.

Please note that there are certain limitations imposed by Airbnb when you opt for the new "Rate Plan API" instead of the legacy API. See here for more information: current limitations of the Rate Plan API

Once the plan you want to link is set up please ask RoomBoss to link to OTA(s).

Once Plans Have Been Linked

Inside each OTA which has had plans linked:

• Check the linked plans are showing as expected

• Check cancel policies on the linked plans

• Delete any old plans

Rate Management Going Forward

Once setup has been done any rate / restriction changes affecting the OTA linked plans will be pushed to the OTAs.

So managing rates via the periods page for a case with a derived OTA rate we might see:

Changing the rate for the Base Rate Plan (via the pencil icon) would automatically update the derived rate values and push this to the linked OTA(s).

We change the restrictions (min / max stay, open,closed) via the pencil icon on the OTA Rate Plan allowing us to have different values for OTAs. Values set here will be pushed to the linked OTA(s).

More Complex Setup Cases

Managing Variable Cancellation Policies

For OTA's like Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb cancellation policies are set at the rate plan level. This means that in order to have separate policies, separate rate plans are needed. So a setup might look like this with 4 plans:

For Summer there are no values set for the winter plans

For Winter there are no values set for the summer rates

The OTA summer and winter plans would be linked to the OTAs but because we have separate plans it is possible to set different policies for summer and winter.