Alpine Retreat Zermatt cut OTA disputes 92% with OTA Reconciliation
Alpine Retreat is a 48-room boutique mountain hotel above Zermatt with a strong OTA mix — roughly 60% of stays booked through Booking.com, Expedia and HRS. Ski season peaks are intense; the OTA reconciliation workload used to be intense with it.
The problem
Andreas Bauer, Alpine Retreat's controller, was spending three full days a month reconciling OTA commission statements against Protel reservations by hand. He would export the OTA statement into Excel, pull a corresponding Protel export, and try to VLOOKUP his way to a comparison — with all the joy that Excel VLOOKUP against inconsistent reservation-ID formats brings.
Of the roughly 800 OTA-booked stays per month across the three channels, Andreas typically found about 30 that looked wrong: cancelled stays still commissioned, wrong length-of-stay counts, mismatched net rates. He would dispute about 24 of them; roughly half would be paid, half would drag on for months.
What we did
Alpine Retreat subscribed to OTA Reconciliation for Protel in September 2025. Setup was 20 minutes: paste the OTA credentials for each of the three channels into the Weareplonet dashboard, choose the Protel API token (already in place from another module), and the module went into backfill for the previous 12 months.
The following month, the report was ready by the 3rd — one PDF per OTA per month, one summary row per reservation with a suggested action. Andreas stopped opening Excel entirely.
The outcome
Over the following six months, Alpine Retreat reclaimed 14.200 euro in over-invoiced commissions — roughly 2.400 euro per month. Two of the historical Booking.com disputes that Andreas had chased for a year were resolved within four weeks of the Weareplonet dispute letter being sent, because the letter presented the reconciliation cleanly and quoted the underlying Booking.com policy language.
More importantly, the number of manual disputes per month fell from 24 to about 2. Not because the OTAs are billing more correctly — they are not — but because the report catches the small ones Andreas used to let slide as not worth the effort. The 22 disputes per month he now automates recover a couple of hundred euros each; individually not worth chasing by hand, collectively very worth chasing when the letters write themselves.
Andreas' own words, on his review on our reviews page: "Best 24 euro per property we spend."
What Alpine Retreat did next
Added Rate Update Bridge for the ski season peak, and Sync Sentinel to monitor it. Total Weareplonet spend for the property is now 82 euro per month across four modules.