Fees the OTA already charged
Your charge types can be set to apply to every booking, for example a Cleaning Fee. Bookings from a channel such as Airbnb, Booking.com or Vrbo (via Channex) often include the same fee already: the guest paid the OTA a cleaning fee as part of the reservation.
When that happens, Stayant does not charge the guest again. The local charge still appears on the booking so you can see what happened, but it is marked as charged by the channel and does not count towards any total.
- The line reads Charged by [channel] instead of being billed. The name and the local amount are struck through, the same way a removed charge is shown.
- The note underneath gives the channel's own name for the fee and what it charged, for example Booking.com already charged the guest for this ("Cleaning fee", £60.00), so it isn't added again. The channel's amount can differ from your local rate. The amount the guest actually paid is the channel's figure, which is already included in the booking's total.
The charges subtotal, grand total, invoice, guest portal and reports all leave this line out.
How Stayant decides a fee was already charged
When a new channel booking arrives, Stayant reads the fees the channel sent with it (the booking's services and each room's fees and taxes). It compares each of your automatic charges with those fees:
- Same name. If the channel's fee has the same name as your charge (ignoring capitals, spaces, punctuation and a trailing "fee" or "charge"), they match. "Cleaning" matches "Cleaning Fee".
- Same kind of fee. Otherwise, Stayant matches the fee types below, recognised by the words in the name:
| Kind of fee | Words Stayant recognises (in your charge name or the channel's fee) |
|---|---|
| Cleaning | clean, cleaning, cleaning_fee |
| Linen | linen, towel, bedding |
| Pet | pet, pets, pet_fee |
| Parking | parking |
| Breakfast | breakfast |
| Resort fee | resort |
| City / tourist tax | city tax, tourist, tourism, visitor tax, occupancy tax, lodging tax |
Anything else is not matched: for example VAT, a generic "fee" or "tax", or "service charge". Those names are too vague to tell what the channel charged for, so your local charge is added as normal.
Some more rules:
- A channel fee of £0 doesn't count. The guest wasn't charged for it, so your charge is added.
- Each channel fee covers one of your charges at most. For example, if you have both "Cleaning Fee" and "Deep clean" and the channel sent one cleaning fee, only one of your charges is marked as covered. An exact name match takes priority.
- Charges the channel did not include are added as normal. For example, a pet fee is still billed when the channel only charged for cleaning.
- This applies whoever collects the money (the OTA or you). The channel's booking total already includes the fee, so adding it again would count it twice.
Changes to the booking
The decision is made once, when the booking first arrives. Later changes from the channel (new dates, a different guest count, or the same update delivered twice) don't add the charge back or mark it again.
If a channel adds a fee after the booking arrived, Stayant does not remove your local charge automatically. Remove it yourself from the booking's Charges and extras card if it is a duplicate.
Bookings imported before this change
Channel bookings that arrived before this change were not checked, so some may have a local charge that duplicates a fee the channel collected. Stayant doesn't change those bookings automatically. Their grand total is still fixed to the channel's figure, so the guest is not billed twice. However, if you clear a booking's total override (see Bookings paid via an OTA), first check its Charges and extras card and remove any charge the channel already collected.