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Take card payments and connect your channels

Two things you do once and that then run on their own. You do not need to know anything technical: at no point will you have to copy keys or set up anything strange.

Part 1

Take card payments for your bookings

About five minutes. You only do it once.

Before you start, have these to hand

Your property's tax details —name, address and NIF— and the number of the bank account where you want to receive the money.

Payments are handled by Stripe, the payment gateway most hotels use. The money goes straight into your account: Hostelum never touches it.

  1. 1

    In your panel, go to Oferta y canales › Motor de reservas (Offer and channels › Booking engine) and open the Pagos (Payments) tab. Inside it you will find the “Cobros con Stripe” (Payments with Stripe) section.

  2. 2

    Press the Conectar con Stripe (Connect with Stripe) button.

    It is the only button there. If you see forms asking you for keys, you are in the wrong place.

  3. 3

    It takes you to the Stripe website. If you already have a Stripe account, sign in with it and use it. If you do not have one, you create it right there.

    You will see your details already filled in —name, country, currency and email address—: Hostelum sends them so that you do not have to type them.

  4. 4

    Stripe will ask you to confirm who you are and where you want to receive the money. This is the longest part, and everybody does it once.

  5. 5

    When you finish, you come back to Hostelum on your own. When it says “tu cuenta de Stripe está conectada” (your Stripe account is connected), you can start taking payments.

If it tells you that Stripe is reviewing your details

That is normal and you have done nothing wrong. Payments switch on by themselves as soon as the review finishes, usually within a few hours. If more than a day goes by, go into your Stripe panel: nearly always there is a document still waiting to be uploaded.

Part 2

Connect your sales channels

Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia and around twenty more.

Before you start, have these to hand

Your sign-in details for each channel's extranet, and your property's identifier on each one. Booking.com calls it the Hotel ID, Expedia the Property ID and Hostelworld the property number. It is in the extranet itself, and if you cannot find it they will give it to you.

Once it is connected, availability and prices sync on their own in both directions: what you sell on one channel stops being free on the rest. The order matters: you authorise it from the channel first and connect it in Hostelum afterwards, never the other way round.

  1. 1

    Start with the channel, not with Hostelum. In Booking.com, sign in to your extranet and look for the connectivity providers section: there you have to authorise the provider we will have named in your welcome email. Expedia, Hostelworld and nearly all the others work the same way, each with its own name for that section.

    This is the step most people skip and the one that causes the most phone calls. If you leave it for later, Hostelum will tell you it does not recognise your identifier: it is not your fault and it is not a fault in the program, it is that this authorisation is missing.

  2. 2

    Airbnb is the exception: there is no extranet to go into and no identifier to copy. You authorise it with a button from your own Airbnb account, just like Stripe.

  3. 3

    Now in Hostelum, go to Oferta y canales › Channel manager (Offer and channels › Channel manager) and choose the channel from the list.

  4. 4

    Paste your property's identifier into the box it asks for. Each channel calls it something different: in Booking.com it is the Hotel ID, in Expedia the Property ID and in Hostelworld the property number.

  5. 5

    Match your rooms and rates with theirs. It means telling the channel that “your double room” and “my double room” are the same one.

    Hostelum suggests the match by name; all you do is confirm it or correct it.

  6. 6

    Check that the channel ends up marked as “Sincronizado” (Synced), with a date and time from a moment ago.

Very important while a channel is connected

Prices, availability and restrictions are changed only from Hostelum, in the Planificador (the planner). If you change them in the channel's extranet as well, one will overwrite the other and you will end up with prices that are not yours.

Questions that always come up

Who receives the money from my bookings?

You do. The payment is taken in your property's name and the money lands in your Stripe account, which transfers it to your bank. Hostelum never holds funds and never keeps any part of the gateway's fee.

Do I have to give anyone my keys?

No. Never. Not to Hostelum and not to anyone. The whole process is buttons and signing in to your own account. If somebody asks you for a secret key to connect your Stripe, be suspicious.

I already have Stripe with another program. Can I still use it?

Yes, as long as it is a Stripe account of your own, one of the ordinary ones. The same account can be connected to several programs at the same time, so you can keep both running while you make the change, with no rush. There is one case where it does not work: if your previous program created you one of the accounts called Express, that one belongs to that program and cannot be reused. You can tell because you cannot sign in to the Stripe panel with it. In that case you create your own, and it takes just as long.

Hostelum says it does not recognise my Hotel ID and I am sure it is right.

Nearly always this means the authorisation in the channel's extranet is missing, not that the number is wrong. The channel has to have accepted the connection with the connectivity provider we told you about first; until that happens, nobody has any record of your identifier. Check it in the channel's extranet and, if you have already authorised it, tell us when: they sometimes take a few hours to approve it.

My booking engine says there is no availability when there is.

The usual reason is that the stay being searched for is shorter than your minimum stay. If you have a minimum of three nights, a search for one night returns nothing. Check it in the Planificador.

Can I stop taking payments online later on?

Yes. In that same Pagos tab you can switch off online payments or disconnect your Stripe account whenever you want. Your account stays yours, with its history and its money.

If you get stuck at any point, stop and write to us before carrying on: it is quicker than undoing it afterwards. None of these steps is urgent or irreversible.

Write to us