Why OTA reconciliation quietly pays for itself
OTA Reconciliation is the least glamorous Blastnes module. It reads bookings from Lodgify, reads statements from Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo, matches every booking to its payout, and produces a monthly exception list. No dynamic pricing, no fancy AI, no guest-facing feature. And yet it is quietly the module with the highest per-host revenue-recovery in our catalogue. Here's the pattern we see, from ~180 hosts using it as of June 2026.
Where the money leaks
Three exception types account for around 90% of what we flag:
- Missing payouts. A booking cleared in Lodgify, the guest checked in, the calendar was updated — but the payout never appeared on the OTA statement. Usually a technical hiccup on the OTA side; a support ticket almost always recovers the money. Median amount per instance: 340 €.
- Wrong commission percentage. The OTA charged 17% instead of the contracted 15% (or the promoted-listing 20% instead of 17% because a promo campaign accidentally overlapped). Median recovery per instance: 45 €, but very frequent.
- Cancellation fees not applied. A non-refundable booking cancelled inside the deadline, no penalty charged. This is the biggest single-instance recovery — median 220 €, sometimes into four figures for long stays.
The 1–2% number
Aggregated across those ~180 hosts, the module surfaces disparities worth about 1.4% of gross OTA revenue per month. Not every disparity converts to a real recovery — some are legitimate (the guest genuinely disputed a fee) — but the confirmed-recovery rate is around 70%. That means for a host doing 15 000 €/month in OTA revenue, the module finds around 210 € of disparities monthly, of which around 145 € is actually recovered. Against a subscription of 24 €/month, the ROI is boringly obvious.
Why hosts don't do this manually
Because it takes six hours per week per portfolio to do properly. Downloading three OTA statements, unifying booking IDs (each OTA uses its own scheme), matching to Lodgify's booking ledger, spotting the disparities. A junior operations person can do it, but the same person can also do six hours of higher-value work — following up leads, improving guest messaging, upselling upgrades. Automating it is not glamorous; it is just the right cost decision.
What we improved this quarter
Two things: we added Expedia to the supported OTAs (previously Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo only), and we started auto-generating a pre-filled email to the OTA for every recoverable disparity — the host still sends it, but from a draft that already has the booking ID, statement line and expected amount. Recovery-conversion has since risen from 61% to 74%.