Setting up an OTA reconciliation flow that actually holds

Nearly every hotelier on Rezlynx has a nagging suspicion that the monthly OTA commission bill is wrong. Nearly no hotelier has time to sit for a full working day rechecking every line by hand. And so the suspicion is never resolved and the money keeps going out.

Building a reconciliation flow that actually holds means solving three problems at once. Problem one: getting the OTA statement into a workable format. Booking.com and Expedia both provide CSV downloads; Agoda is less consistent. Problem two: getting the matching Rezlynx reservation set into the same workspace. That has to include cancelled and no-show reservations because the disputes typically live in those categories. Problem three: writing a matching rule that ignores the trivial differences (a one-pence rounding, a currency conversion) and flags the substantive ones (a full commission on a cancelled stay).

The manual flow — a spreadsheet with three tabs and a set of nested VLOOKUPs — works for a fortnight and then breaks down. What we have found reliably holds is a job that runs the reconciliation nightly, keeps a running ledger of every disputed line, and gives the reservations manager a filtered list of just the current-month disputes with a one-click dispute email pre-written for each one.

That is what OTA Reconciliation for Rezlynx does. In the Falmouth pilot property it recovered £8K per month in the first quarter, and the reservations manager who used to lose two working days each month to the exercise now spends twenty minutes clicking through the flagged lines.