Your Booking Engine

It is your own booking site, running on your own address, in your own colours. A guest books through it and you keep the whole amount — there is no commission to anyone.

Put that next to the alternative. A guest who finds you on Booking.com costs you somewhere between 15% and 20% of the booking. The same guest booking on your own site costs you nothing.

It is not either/or. The OTAs are how new guests discover you, and they are worth their commission for that. But a guest who already knows your name — one who saw your Instagram, or stayed last year, or was recommended by a friend — should never cost you commission. Your Booking Engine is where those bookings land.

And it is not a separate product. Bookings from it appear on your calendar on a real room, with the payment already recorded, alongside everything else.

There is no Booking Engine tab. It is a card at the top of Front Desk Settings → Channel Management, and its settings are spread across four places.

That is genuinely confusing the first time, so here is the map:

Press Activate on the Booking Engine card. Because there is nothing set up yet, that opens a short setup drawer rather than flipping a switch.

The drawer is titled Set up Booking Engine — "Pick a slug and a payment provider to provision this property."

1. Storefront slug — This becomes your booking site's web address. Lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens. Choose your hotel's name, short and recognisable.
2. Payment provider (optional) — Pick one if you have credentials ready, or choose "— Skip for now (configure later) —" and come back to it. You can set the whole thing up before wiring payments.
3. Currency — Shown but not editable. It comes from your property settings.
4. Press Set up.

The card then gains an expand arrow and its button becomes a real on/off switch — Deactivate to take your site offline, Activate to bring it back.

Your slug plus .bookings.amiqa.io. If your slug is casanara, your booking site is:

https://casanara.bookings.amiqa.io

Open it in a browser as soon as you have set up — that is your live site, and seeing it is the fastest way to know everything worked.

Put it everywhere a guest might look:

• The Book Now button on your website
• Your Instagram and Facebook bio
• Your WhatsApp Business away message
• Your email signature
• A QR code at reception, for guests booking their next stay

Every one of those is a booking that could have cost you commission and did not.

Yes. Expand the Booking Engine card, edit the Storefront slug and press Rename. Amiqa checks availability as you type and tells you where you stand:

Rename only becomes available once the name is valid, different from your current one, and confirmed available.

If you do rename, update every link you have published. The old address stops working.

Expand the Booking Engine card and open Payment methods. There are two, and you can enable either or both.

Tilopay takes card payments online. Card details go straight to Tilopay and never touch Amiqa's systems.

Cash means the guest books now and pays when they arrive. Its own description says it plainly: "Guests with pay-at-property rate plans settle the booking on arrival. No card is taken at checkout."

Stripe and PayPal are not supported on the booking engine — card processing runs through Tilopay, so that is the account to have ready. (Stripe does handle your own Amiqa subscription, which is a separate thing.) And at least one method must be enabled before your site can take a booking — the form will tell you if neither is on.

To take money up front, use Tilopay together with prepayment on your cancellation policies. That combination is what charges the card at booking rather than at arrival.

Four values, copied from your Tilopay account. The form tells you where they live: "Copy these from Admin → Tilopay Checkout. Leave secret fields empty to keep current values."

• API user
• API password
• API key
• Webhook secret

Tick Enabled on the Tilopay block and save. All four are required — the form will refuse to enable Tilopay with any of them missing.

Once saved, the three secret fields show •••••••• (already set) rather than your values. To change one, type the new value over it. To remove one, use Clear — and Undo if you did that by mistake. Leaving a secret field untouched keeps what is already stored, which is why you never have to re-enter all four to change one.

Four steps, in this order: Select Date → Select Room → Summary → Guest & Payment. A progress bar across the top shows where they are.

The first screen is your hero image, your hotel name and logo, and a search box asking for just two dates. It does not ask how many people are coming — guests choose that on each room card once they can see what is available. Fewer questions up front means fewer people giving up before they see a price.

Along the top: Rooms, Contact and Policies, plus a language switcher so guests can browse in English or Spanish. There is also a small ticket button for entering a promo code.

The room cards use the photos, descriptions and guest-facing names you set in Rooms & Rate Plans, and each shows its cancellation terms — Free cancellation until a real date, or Non-refundable — so guests choose with their eyes open. Then extras, then their details, then payment.

Everything on it comes from settings you control: your hero image and colours from Property Profile, your rooms and prices from Rooms & Rate Plans, your policies from your rate plans and your check-in text.

Front Desk Settings → Extra Services — "Add-ons guests can buy alongside their stay (transfers, breakfast, late check-out…)." Press + Add service and fill in:

• Service name — "Shown to guests during checkout." Be concrete: "Airport transfer", not "Transport"
• Description — "Briefly describe what's included." This is where you say it is private, air-conditioned, and meets them at arrivals
• Price
• Pricing model — Per person, Per room or Per night. Get this right: a transfer is per person, a crib is per stay, parking is per night
• Photo — PNG or JPG up to 5 MB. Photos sell add-ons the same way they sell rooms

When a guest buys one, it arrives on the booking with its quantity and price, so your front desk knows a transfer is expected and what was paid for it.

Front Desk Settings → Promo codes — "Create discount codes for your booking engine" — then New promo code.

• Code — what the guest types. "Letters, numbers, dashes, underscores. Max 32 characters." Make it memorable: WELCOME10, REPEAT15
• Discount type — Percent or Fixed
• Valid from and Valid until — both optional. Leave them empty for a code with no end date
• Maximum redemptions — "Leave empty for unlimited"
• Active — switch it off to disable a code without deleting it

The list shows how many times each code has been used against its limit, so you can watch a campaign land in real time.

Promo codes only work on your own booking site. That is the point — a discount you control, that costs you no commission, and that gives guests a concrete reason to book direct rather than through an OTA.

Not yet. Rules like a minimum stay, blackout dates, first-time guests only, or limiting a code to certain room types are not configurable today.

What a code does have:

• A validity window — valid from and valid until
• A redemption limit — how many times it can be used in total
• An on/off switch

Within those, it applies to any booking made on your site.

So use the levers you do have. A short validity window is a blunt version of blackout dates. A low redemption limit caps your exposure. And you can always switch a code off the moment it stops making sense.

The booking appears on your calendar within moments, already on a specific room. Not in a tray waiting for you — a real room, allocated at the moment the guest paid.

What comes with it:

• A reference beginning BE- — that is the guest's confirmation number and what you search for at the front desk
• The payment already recorded as completed, if they paid by card. Open the folio and it is settled
• Any extras they bought, with quantities and prices
• Their special requests

While a guest is on the payment step, the room is held for 15 minutes. If the payment fails, the booking stays held so they can try again — it is only released when the hold runs out. That means a guest fumbling their card details does not lose the room to someone else.

Because availability is judged across the whole stay. A guest needs the same room for every night they asked for — a room free on nights one to three but taken on night four will not be offered for a four-night stay.

That is why a calendar which looks fairly open can still come back empty for one specific week. When it happens, work through these:

1. Minimum stay on the arrival date — a 3-night minimum hides your rooms from anyone searching 2 nights
2. Stop sell on any night in the range
3. Closed to arrival on the check-in date
4. Room blocks for maintenance sitting mid-range
5. Room status — rooms in maintenance are excluded everywhere
6. Whether a single room really is free for every night requested

Fixed limits you cannot change: rooms are held 15 minutes during payment, same-day bookings are allowed, the shortest bookable stay is 1 night and the longest is 30.

Work through this, then make one real booking on your own site before you publish the link anywhere.

• Room types created, with occupancy limits and photos
• Rooms added inside each type
• Rates set, and guest-facing storefront labels written
• Taxes enabled and a test total checked against your own arithmetic
• Cancellation policies chosen and attached to your rate plans
• Property Profile complete — hero image, description, amenities, contact, terms, colours
• At least one payment method enabled
• Extra services created and their Booking engine toggle switched on
• Slug chosen and your address written down
• Booking Engine card showing ACTIVE
• Test booking made, appearing on the calendar on a real room
• Test booking's total, taxes and payment all correct
• Your link added to your website, Instagram bio and email signature

The usual causes, in the order they usually turn out to be.

Nothing loads at all — check the Booking Engine card reads ACTIVE, and that you are using the right address: your slug plus .bookings.amiqa.io.

Rooms are missing — the room type needs photos and a rate, the rooms inside it must be available rather than in maintenance, and there must be genuine availability for the whole date range.

Prices look wrong — check the rate group applied to those dates in Inventory, and whether an override is in play. Remember a per-room rate is a two-guest price, with extra-person fees on top.

Guest-facing names look internal — write your storefront labels on the rate groups in Rooms & Rate Plans.

Extras are invisible — the Booking engine toggle on the service is off.

Pets are missing — the room type must allow that pet size and the rate plan must have a fee for it. Both, or pets silently disappear.

Payment fails — re-enter your four Tilopay credentials, then make a small test booking to confirm the payment lands.