Hotel Amalfi Positano fixes 89% of OTA disputes in 90 days
The property
Hotel Amalfi is a seasonal 28-room family-run hotel perched on the cliffside of Positano on the Amalfi Coast, open from April to October. Season 2024 brought approximately €880,000 in room revenue at an ADR of €248 and occupancy of 71%. The property runs a mix of channels weighted heavily towards intermediated: Booking.com 46%, Expedia 22%, Hotelbeds (through Roiback) 12%, direct via Wubook Bookizer 17%, remainder from Agoda and Airbnb.
The team is minimal: owner-operator Ludovico Esposito, his cousin Andrea handling front office, one receptionist during peak season, four housekeepers, an F&B pair for the small breakfast room. No dedicated finance person — invoices and statements were handled by Ludovico himself in the shoulder season.
The problem
Every autumn Ludovico set aside four full days in the first week of November to reconcile the season's OTA commission statements against Wubook reservations. Every year he found discrepancies: commission rates applied at 18% instead of the negotiated 15%, cancellations charged despite valid free-cancellation waivers, ghost bookings that never checked in but were still on the invoice.
The 2023 season closed with an estimated €22,000 in disputed commissions across the three main channels. Of that, Ludovico managed to recover €4,800 through Booking.com's dispute portal — the rest fell into the "not worth chasing" pile because manually building the evidence pack for each ticket took longer than the potential recovery.
What they activated
OTA Reconciliation for Wubook, €24 per month, activated 12 March 2025 just before the season opened. Setup took 40 minutes: Wubook Login flow, IMAP configuration on the finance mailbox (statements auto-fetch when they arrive from each OTA), and a 24-month backfill of 2023 and 2024 statements that ran overnight.
The backfill immediately produced a dispute pack of 143 line items across the two prior seasons — evidence pre-built for each: reservation ID, guest name, arrival date, actual amount charged in Wubook, amount on OTA statement, delta. Ludovico submitted 60 of those to Booking.com's dispute portal in one afternoon, using the pre-built evidence packs. 51 were approved within 30 days, recovering €7,240.
The numbers after 90 days
Dispute resolution rate: 89% of discrepancies flagged during the first 90 days of 2025 were resolved in the OTA's favour of Hotel Amalfi. Compare to roughly 22% in the manual regime.
Cash recovered: €11,850 for the first half of the 2025 season, projected €22,000+ for the full season versus a €288 module cost.
Time saved: the four autumn days of manual reconciliation replaced by ~30 minutes per week during the season, mostly reviewing auto-generated dispute packs before submission.
Side effect: because reconciliation now runs weekly instead of annually, Ludovico caught a Booking.com contract-renewal bug in June where the commission rate silently jumped from 15% to 18% for two weeks. Caught, disputed and reverted before it did meaningful damage.
Quote from the owner
"The module paid for itself twice over in the first month. I would not go back to shuffling PDFs in November."
— Ludovico Esposito, owner, Hotel Amalfi Positano