If you list your property on more than one booking site, you're already running a small airline's worth of inventory by hand. Here's what that costs you, and what changes when the sites are connected.
First, what an OTA is
OTA stands for online travel agent. It means the booking sites guests use to find somewhere to stay: Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda, Expedia, Hostelworld. They put your rooms in front of travellers who would never have found you, and they take a commission on each booking they send.
For most small properties in Sri Lanka, they're where a big share of the bookings come from. That's fine. The trouble starts when you're on more than one of them.
What goes wrong when you run them by hand
Each OTA has its own extranet, its own calendar, and its own idea of which rooms are free. None of them talk to each other. So the calendar that matters is the one in your head, or on a sheet behind the front desk, and every booking means updating all the others before someone else books the same room.
The same room sold twice on a busy weekend. One guest arrives to a room that is already taken, and you make the apology call, find them somewhere else, and often pay the difference.
Rates that drift. You raise the price for the season on Booking.com and forget Agoda, and now the cheapest way to book you is the site that charges you the most.
Cancellations that never free the room. A guest cancels on one site, the room stays blocked on the others, and a night you could have sold goes empty.
Mornings lost to reconciling. Logging into three extranets, copying bookings into a spreadsheet, checking nothing overlaps. It is work that earns you nothing.
The overbooking penalty. OTAs rank properties partly on reliability. Cancelling a guest because you were double booked can push you down the search results, which costs you bookings you never see.
What connecting them changes
Connecting your OTAs means Book-ah talks to them directly, so you stop being the go-between. There's one calendar, and every site reads from it.
A booking from Airbnb lands in Book-ah and closes that room on Booking.com, Agoda and everywhere else within a minute.
Change a rate once and it goes out to every site. Close a room for repairs once and it closes everywhere.
Reservations arrive in the same front desk as your direct bookings, with the guest details, so check-in looks the same whichever site they came from.
Cancellations free the room everywhere, so it is back on sale before the guest has closed the app.
Why it is priced per property
Most of Book-ah is one flat price per plan, however many properties you run. The OTA connection is the exception, and here's why.
Keeping a property in sync means every rate, every closed date and every booking for that property goes back and forth with every site it is listed on, all day. The service that does that bills us for each connected property. So that is how we charge for it: a fixed amount per connected property, per month, shown on the pricing page.
It also means you don't pay for what you don't use. Connect two villas to Airbnb and leave a third on direct bookings only, and you pay the OTA connection on two. Pause a property for the off season and it stops counting from the next invoice.
Who does not need it
If every booking you take comes through your own website, a phone call or WhatsApp, you don't need the OTA connection. Book-ah gives every plan a direct booking website with live availability and a real price, and plenty of properties run on that alone. You can start without it and switch it on the day you list somewhere.
And the commission
Connecting an OTA doesn't change what the OTA charges you. Travel agents take 15 to 18 percent of every booking they send, and that's their price for finding you a guest. What the connection changes is that listing on them costs you that commission and never a room you had already sold.
The cheapest booking is still the direct one. The best setup is the OTAs bringing in guests who would never have found you, and your own website taking the ones who already know your name.
See what it costs for your property
Pick a plan, say yes or no to the OTA connection, and tell us how many properties to connect. The price is on the page before you sign anything.
See pricing