Connecting Your Channels

It puts Amiqa in charge of your OTA rates and availability, and brings their bookings into your calendar. You stop logging into Booking.com to change prices, and you stop selling the same room twice.

Before: you keep a spreadsheet, you update Booking.com, you update Expedia, and one Saturday somebody books your last room on both at once.

After: you set the price once in Amiqa. Both OTAs get it within moments. The instant a room sells anywhere, it disappears from everywhere else.

That last part is the whole point. Every room you sell is removed from every other channel automatically, so an overbooking has to be your decision rather than an accident.

Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb — all three are live.

Airbnb goes further than the other two, because Airbnb guests behave differently. As well as rates, availability and bookings, you get inquiries — guests asking before they book, which you can pre-approve or answer with a special offer — and alterations, where a guest requests a change you accept or decline. Both are handled in the Channels Hub.

Between the three, you are covering most of the demand a small independent hotel sees.

Each connected channel gets a card in Front Desk Settings → Channel Management showing its status and letting you turn it on or off.

From Front Desk Settings → Channel Management, add the channel and provide the credentials it asks for. Each card then shows a status badge — ACTIVE or INACTIVE — and a button to activate or deactivate it.

The card expands with a chevron to reveal its settings, including room mapping.

Once connected, a channel moves through two states. It starts waiting for mapping, and only becomes fully connected once you have told it which of your rooms correspond to which of theirs. A channel that is connected but unmapped does not sell anything — that is the step people skip.

Deactivating a channel stops it selling without deleting the connection, which is what you want for a seasonal closure. Your mapping and history stay intact, so switching it back on is one click rather than a fresh setup.

That is why there is no separate "disconnect" — deactivating is the safe version of the same thing.

Mapping tells the OTA which of your room types is which of theirs. Until a room type is mapped, that room does not exist as far as the channel is concerned — no availability goes out and no bookings come back.

Your "Junior Suite" and Booking.com's listing for the same room are two separate records. Mapping connects them so a price change on your side lands on the right listing on theirs.

You map two things:

• Room types — yours to theirs
• Rate plans — which of your rates feeds which of their rate plans

If a channel is active but quiet, mapping is the first thing to check. A partly mapped channel is worse than an unmapped one, because it sells some rooms and silently ignores others.

Rates, availability and restrictions go out to the OTA. Bookings, modifications and cancellations come in to Amiqa.

You set the restrictions in Inventory, not here. This screen manages the connection; Inventory manages what goes down it.

Under a minute. You change a price or close a date, and it is live on every connected channel before you have finished the next thing.

There is nothing to press and nothing to wait for — no "push now" button, no nightly batch.

That speed is what makes last-minute moves worth doing. Three rooms still empty for tonight at 4pm is a price you can still change and still sell. A system that synced overnight would make that pointless.

Yes. Your rates go out from one place, but each channel can carry its own mark-up or mark-down — a percentage or a fixed amount.

So a channel taking 18% commission can sell at a higher rate than your own booking site, and you end up with the same amount in your pocket either way. You still keep one set of prices; the channel applies its own adjustment on top.

The usual setup for a small hotel:

• Your own booking site — your base price. No commission, so it can be the cheapest place to book, which is exactly the message you want.
• The OTAs — marked up enough to cover their commission

Yes, automatically. Change your hotel name, address, phone or check-in time and it travels out to your connected channels without you opening anything else.

This is one of the quieter conveniences in Amiqa and worth knowing about, because otherwise you will go and do it twice. Update your check-in time from 14:00 to 15:00 in one place and Booking.com and Expedia get the new time on their own.

The same is true of details you change on the Dashboard side — they reach the Front Desk and then continue out to your channels.

It appears on your calendar within moments, with the guest's details and the OTA's own pricing and taxes. Three things about it are worth knowing in advance.

It may arrive unallocated. OTAs sell a room type, not a specific room. If Amiqa cannot pick a room for it automatically, the booking lands in a striped Unallocated lane at the top of your calendar until you assign one. Nothing is wrong — it is waiting for you to decide who goes where.

It carries the OTA's taxes, not yours. The guest already agreed a total with the OTA, so that total is what Amiqa keeps. Your property tax rules are not applied on top, which prevents double-taxing.

It may carry a credit card. Bookings that come with card details store them securely, and you can reveal the card when you need to charge it. That has its own verification step.

You will also see the channel it came from as a small coloured badge — a blue B for Booking.com, a gold E for Expedia.

Four controls that shape how your rooms can be booked, rather than whether they exist. You set them per date in Inventory and they go out to every channel.

• Stop sell — take a room off sale for a date without deleting anything. Availability goes to zero on every channel; turn it off and it comes straight back.
• Minimum stay — a guest arriving on this date must book at least this many nights. Your defence against a one-night booking wrecking a holiday weekend.
• Maximum stay — the most nights allowed from this arrival date.
• Closed to arrival — no check-ins on this date. Useful when you have no staff to receive arrivals.
• Closed to departure — no checkouts on this date. Rarer, occasionally required around minimum-stay packages.

Work through these in order — the first three cover almost everything.

1. Is the channel active? The card shows ACTIVE or INACTIVE. An inactive channel is doing nothing by design.
2. Is the room type mapped? An unmapped room type never sells. New room types are the usual culprit.
3. Is there a stop sell or a restriction on those dates? A minimum stay of 3 nights makes your rooms invisible to anyone searching for 2.
4. Is the room itself available? A room set to maintenance or unavailable is excluded from everything on purpose.
5. Sign out and back in. This refreshes the connection between the Dashboard and the Front Desk, and settles a surprising number of "this looks wrong" moments.
6. Check Operations → Activity. It records channel disconnections, deactivations and sync errors, so you can see whether something actually failed and when.

If a genuine sync error is recorded and none of the above explains it, that is the point to contact support — with the date and the room type to hand.

On the channel itself, in Front Desk Settings → Channel Management. Each connection carries its own commission, and you can set a percentage or a fixed amount, different for every channel.

That figure then feeds the revenue numbers in the Channels Hub, so you can see what a channel actually earns you after the OTA takes its cut.

That comparison is worth making regularly. A channel bringing lots of bookings at 18% commission may be earning you less than a quieter one at 12% — and both are earning you less than the same guest booking direct on your own site at zero commission.

Channel management is its own permission. It usually sits with whoever owns the property, because connecting a channel and mapping rooms affects what the whole world can book.

If you can see Channel Management but cannot change anything, you have read access without update access.