Leaving Hostaway because of their booking fee?

MOR Channel How Payments Work

Merchant of Record (MOR) is a business model where a third-party entity assumes the responsibility of processing channel booking payments.

MOR Bookings Accepted

OwnerRez accepts Merchant of Record (MOR) bookings with simple "paid" information:

  • Total Booking Amount (total of host designate rent, fees, and taxes) - sum of amounts in bookingRequest.bookingRequestDetails.orderItemList
  • Total Guest Fees (fees charged to guest in addition to Total Booking Amount) - bookingRequest.bookingRequestDetails.olbMeta.serviceFee
  • Total Commission (fee charged to host and deducted from the Total Booking Amount before payout/vcc to the host) - bookingRequest.bookingRequestDetails.commission.ownerFee
  • Estimated payout out date (when funds will be issued to the host) - bookingRequest.bookingRequestDetails.paymentForm.paymentChannelMoR.projectedDepositDate

OwnerRez will create a "Credit card (processed elsewhere)" payment record against the booking to reflect that the guest has paid, along with a fee record to reflect the amount kept by the channel.

In summary, instead of submitting a paymentCard element, you should submit a paymentChannelMoR element. The required information for this payment method are paymentFormType (should always be "CHANNELMOR") and projectedDepositDate (the estimated date that funds will be issued to the host by whatever means the Channel and Host agree upon). The other two fields are optional, but helpful in the case of ACH payouts for the host to identify where payouts will go.

<bookingRequest>
<bookingRequestDetails>
...
<paymentForm>
<paymentChannelMoR>
<paymentFormType>CHANNELMOR</paymentFormType>
<projectedDepositDate>2023-09-01</projectedDepositDate>
<bankName>WellsFargo</bankName>
<bankLastFour>9999</bankLastFour>
</paymentChannelMoR>
</paymentForm>
<bookingRequestDetails>
</bookingRequest>

Booking Cancellations

You can cancel a booking by using the CancelBooking endpoint:

POST /haapi/haolb/cancelbooking?type=your username&key=your key

This will cancel the booking with appropriate guest emails and user alerts and delete the recorded MoR payment. It will not refund any other payments the user may have taken separately.

The request will be as follows (with example parameters):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<bookingCancelRequest>
  <advertiserAssignedId>ora7123455x</advertiserAssignedId>
  <reservationExternalId>ORB123456</reservationExternalId>
  <cancellationEntity>Guest</cancellationEntity>
</bookingCancelRequest>

Parameters:

  • advertiserAssignedId: the advertiser id (starting with ora)
  • reservationExternalId: the OwnerRez booking number (starting with ORB)
  • cancellationEntity: optional, one of Guest, Owner, Admin. default will be Admin if not specified

Booking Changes

Any changes to the reservation after booking, such as extensions or add-ons, will be handled between the host and guest directly. The channel will simply need to provide the host with the ability to issue refunds to the guest if necessary.

Virtual Credit Cards (VCCs) Policy

You are certainly free to continue issuing VCCs to hosts. OwnerRez simply won't provide any process to collect or run those. The host would need to use their POS or online terminal with their card processor to collect those funds.

You can find MOR details in our OLB doc here.