Bookings paid via an OTA
Some bookings from a channel — Booking.com and similar, via Channex — arrive already settled from
the guest's side: the OTA collected the guest's money itself and pays you separately, outside
Stayant. Stayant reads this from the reservation's payment_collect field, and when the amount
the OTA reports covers the booking's full total, marks the booking Paid via OTA.
This is Stayant's best reading of what the channel told us — not confirmation that money has reached anyone's account. Channex has no field that reports whether a payment has actually cleared, only who is responsible for collecting it. "Paid via OTA" means the channel says the OTA is on the hook for this booking and reported an amount that covers the bill, not that Stayant has verified funds landed anywhere.
When it appears
A booking only switches to Paid via OTA when the amount the OTA reported (shown on the booking as OTA Amount), together with any payments already recorded, is enough to cover the booking's grand total. If the channel didn't report an amount, or Stayant couldn't parse it, the booking stays Unpaid or Part Paid and keeps being chased as normal — Stayant would rather over-chase a booking that's actually settled than quietly mark one paid when the guest might still owe the property something.
You'll see it in three places:
Bookings list — the Payment column shows a Paid via OTA badge, and the Payment filter has a matching "Paid via OTA" option.
Booking detail panel — the financials section adds a Collected by [OTA name] line for the amount the channel reported, and Balance Due reads £0.00 against it.
Guest portal — in place of the usual Deposit/Balance rows, the guest sees a single Paid via [OTA name] row, marked Paid, with no outstanding balance and no Pay Now button.
The invoice PDF reflects the same figure: it adds the OTA amount as a payment line (e.g. "Paid via Booking.com") and nets it against the total, so the invoice shows it as paid rather than still owed.
What doesn't get chased or charged
Once a booking reads Paid via OTA, the money-chasing paths below all skip it:
- The upcoming-due payment-schedule reminder email (
FinalPaymentReminder) skips it. - The daily balance-overdue message (
BalanceOverdueDaily) skips it. - Automatic card charging — see Channel-booking cards and auto-charge — skips it too; there's nothing left to charge.
The dashboard's outstanding-balance figure also excludes it, so a fully OTA-settled booking doesn't inflate what looks like unpaid revenue.
If the guest owes something extra
Money the OTA already collected doesn't disappear if the guest owes something extra afterwards — for example, a damage fee added on checkout. Channex bookings pin their grand total to the figure the channel reported (a total override, set automatically when the booking arrives), so adding a charge on its own doesn't change what counts as the booking's total — the override still wins. To bill for the extra:
- Open the booking's Adjust Total Override action and clear (or raise) the override so the grand total reflects the new charge as well as the original stay.
- Add the charge.
As soon as the override no longer covers the new grand total, Stayant recomputes the booking's payment status by itself — no separate "recalculate" step — and it drops back to Part Paid, with normal balance-chasing resuming for the genuine shortfall only.
What not to do
Don't record a manual payment against a Paid via OTA booking to "match" what the OTA collected. Stayant never creates a payment record for OTA money — it's tracked separately as a credit from the channel, not money that has passed through your account — so adding one yourself would create a payment with nothing behind it, and would throw off your payment history, refund tracking, and reporting. If the badge and the Collected-by line already show the booking as settled, there's nothing left to record.
Fixing older bookings (internal/ops note)
Bookings that arrived before this feature shipped won't have a payment_collect value recorded,
so some may still show as Unpaid or Part Paid even though the OTA already paid. This is repaired
centrally, not per-tenant: from the platform Channex admin screen, a Stayant admin can run the
"Backfill 'who collected' on existing bookings" button, which re-reads payment_collect from
Channex for existing linked bookings across the account and stamps it, removing any
payment-schedule instalments that no longer apply. It's a one-off repair tool, safe to run more
than once — a booking it has already resolved is left alone on a later run, even if Channex's
answer for it were to change.