3rd Party OTA Bookings

3rd party Online Travel Agencies (OTA) such as Viator, TripAdvisor, GetYourGuide, Groupon, etc. allow guests to create bookings upstream of your integrated reservation system (FareHarbor, Rezdy, Bookeo, etc).

This article hopes to address some FAQs, expose how this process works, and demonstrate how to identify common issues/behaviour.

FAQs

Will bookings made through an OTA still receive automated communications from Wherewolf?

If a guest has booked an activity through an OTA, the booking is then likely to have been received in the operator's reservation system and, if integrated, the reservation system will pass the booking details to Wherewolf. Therefore, as far as Wherewolf is concerned, the booking has come from the reservation system in just the same way that 'normal' (non-OTA bookings) do!

Often OTAs will mask a customer's email address so that they can remain a "middle-man" in the booking and prevent the operators from contacting the guest directly.

They achieve this by providing the booker with masked email addresses that can look something like "[e-mail]" or "[e-mail]".

In these cases, Wherewolf will send automated pre-arrival communications to these masked email addresses. It is then up to the OTA to properly process and forward the email to the appropriate guest email address.

These email addresses will not be accepted on the waiver, and the lead booker will be prompted to enter a valid email address in their waiver.

 

Why are my waivers not showing in FareHarbor for OTA bookings?

When Wherewolf is integrated with FareHarbor it allows newly completed or updated waiver data to be transferred to FareHarbor.

However, FareHarbor may NOT show waiver data that originated from OTA bookings automatically. FareHarbor may require you to follow these steps to "reveal" the waiver data for EACH booking.

1. In the FareHarbor booking view (for the affected booking), scroll to bottom of the page and use the dropdown tab to "Add fields" in the whole-booking fields section.
2. In the Add fields section that expands scroll to the bottom of the options list, tick the "waivers" option and click "Add fields".
3. The events page that follows automatically will display an entry with the waivers that were added for this specific booking.
4. The booking will now display the associated waivers that were sent from Wherewolf in FareHarbor under the "Whole-booking field" -> "Waiver" section.

IMPORTANT: As these steps occur outside of the Wherewolf platform we are unable to offer detailed troubleshooting or a more permanent solution for this scenario. If you have concerns about this behaviour, or steps to overcome this scenario we ask that you please direct your request to the FareHarbor support team: [e-mail]