Webinar: OTA Revenue Leakage: What Hotels Are Missing and How to Recover It
Watch The Webinar
Watch the full OTA Revenue Leakage: What Hotels Are Missing and How to Recover It webinar to see where OTA discrepancies hide, what effective reservation-level reconciliation looks like, and how hotel finance teams can shift from reactive audits to proactive exception management.
For hotels, an OTA booking does not end when the reservation is confirmed or the payment arrives. Between the OTA, PMS, virtual credit card, payment processor, bank, and general ledger, a single reservation can create multiple opportunities for revenue to slip through unnoticed.
In our recent webinar, OTA Revenue Leakage: What Hotels Are Missing and How to Recover It, Evention Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Mike Baldinger joined CMO Patrick Niersbach to break down where those discrepancies occur and why traditional reconciliation processes often fail to catch them.
The Problem Is At The Reservation Level
Many hotel finance teams reconcile OTA activity by reviewing deposits, PMS totals, or monthly reports. The challenge is that matching the total does not necessarily mean every reservation within that total was settled correctly.
As Mike explained:
“Close confirms totals. It does not confirm correctness.”
Small VCC underpayments, commission overpayments, missed resort fees, rate discrepancies, and guest mischarges can offset one another at the summary level. That means a clean-looking deposit can still contain dozens of individual errors.
For a typical 300-room property with meaningful OTA volume, the webinar highlighted approximately $130,000 or more in annual direct revenue leakage across common discrepancy categories.
Why Timing Matters
Finding an OTA discrepancy is only useful if the hotel still has time to act on it. Virtual credit cards can expire, commission dispute windows can close, and guest billing errors can turn into chargebacks and negative reviews before finance discovers the issue.
That is why the session focused on moving from periodic reconciliation to daily, reservation-level validation.
“You cannot find transaction level discrepancies by reviewing summary level reports.”
Mike outlined four requirements for a stronger OTA reconciliation process: validate every reservation, detect discrepancies daily, surface only actionable exceptions, and resolve issues before close.
From Reactive Reconciliation To Proactive Control
The webinar also shared real-world examples of the types of issues daily validation can uncover, including a $176 VCC underpayment, a $233 commission overpayment, and a $2,300 guest double charge that was caught before checkout.
The takeaway is simple: OTA reconciliation should do more than confirm that money arrived. It should confirm that every reservation was settled correctly while there is still time to recover revenue or prevent a guest issue.
As Mike put it:
“The volume of those things that are happening... really open people’s eyes.”
