What is the difference between a booking source and a source type?

A source type is a category with a commission percentage attached, such as OTA at 15 percent. A booking source is one specific place business comes from, such as Booking.com, and it belongs to a type. You maintain the types once and then point many sources at them, which is why a commission change is made on the type rather than on every source that uses it.

Why can I not edit or delete Walk-in?

It is a system source. Prostay needs somewhere to put a booking taken from somebody at the desk with no reservation, so the row is protected: no row menu, and therefore no way to rename it, open it or remove it. Its bookings count in the reports like any other source's.

Does the Key Account flag change anything?

No. It changes no commission, no rate and no behaviour anywhere in Prostay. It is a label you can filter by, so its only value is the one your property agrees to give it. If you want to know which sources are actually producing, use Source Production or the production reports.

I applied Highest Performing and got the same number of sources.

That is right. Source Production is the one filter here that reorders instead of removing, so every source stays in the list and the count beside the heading does not move. The sources that have brought in the most are now on page one.

Does the export give me every source or only this page?

The page you are on, with your filters and your search applied. There is no row selection on this screen, so if you want all of your sources in one file, set Rows at the foot of the table to 100 before you press Export .

If I delete a source, what happens to its bookings?

They keep the source they were booked under, so your past production figures do not change. What disappears is the source record itself, along with its contact details, notes, documents and activity log, and the source stops appearing in the picker on new bookings.

Reading the booking sources list

Every booking in Prostay came from somewhere, and this is the list of the somewheres. One row is one place business arrives from: an OTA, a travel agent, a corporate account, your own website, or the person who walks up to the desk with no reservation at all. The name in the first column is the name that will appear against a booking, on the production reports, and in the source picker when somebody creates a reservation by hand.

Two things this screen is not. It is not where commission is set: commission belongs to the source's Source Type, which is Source types and their commissions. And it is not where a channel connection is made. Adding a row called Booking.com here does not connect you to Booking.com; it gives you somewhere to attribute a booking to.

The screen

The Booking Sources screen for The Marlowe Hotel, with a count of 13 beside the title, a filter row holding Add filter, a search box, Advanced and Export, and a table of ten sources showing name, primary contact, source code, source type, email, phone, country and a Key Account column of Yes and No badges. — Every place a booking can come from, ten at a time. Everything below explains one band of this screen.

The heading. The grey number beside Booking Sources is how many sources match what you have filtered to, not how many you have. With nothing filtered it is the size of your list.
The filter row. Add filter and its chips on the left; search, Advanced and Export on the right.
The table. Ten sources at a time. Rows are not clickable; the menu at the end of each one is the way in.
The pager. How many matched, and where you are in them.

Create New at the top right opens the add panel, which is covered in Adding and editing a booking source.

The nine columns

The header row and first four rows of the booking sources table: Booking.com and Expedia typed OTA, Hotelbeds typed Travel Agent and Amex GBT typed Corporate, each with a contact name, a short source code, an email, a phone number, a country code and a Key Account badge. — Nine columns. Source Type is the one that carries the commission.

Column	What it holds
Name	What this source is called everywhere else in Prostay: on the booking, in the reservation editor's source picker, and down the left of the production reports. The only column that sorts.
Primary Contact	The person you deal with. A name only; their email and phone are the two columns after next.
Source Code	Your short code for the source, three or four characters by convention. Yours to choose, and useful when a report or an export has no room for the full name.
Source Type	Which type this source belongs to. The type is what carries the commission percentage, so this column is how you tell what a booking through this source costs you.
Email	A live mail link: clicking it opens your mail client rather than the source. Long addresses are cut off with an ellipsis, and the full address is on the source's own page.
Phone	The mobile number from the source's contact details. The company landline is a separate field and does not appear here.
Country	The two-letter country code, shown as a code rather than a name. It drives the Country filter, which does list countries by name.
Key Account	Yes in green or No in grey. Somebody set this by hand. See the next section.
Actions	A three dot menu holding Edit and Delete. Some rows have no menu, which is covered further down.

A dash in a cell means the field is empty on the source, not that the column does not apply. Only Name is required when a source is created, so a source added in a hurry can legitimately show dashes across most of its row.

What Key Account means

Nothing, until you decide what it means. It is a flag somebody ticked on the source, not a figure Prostay works out, and it changes no behaviour: a key account gets no different commission, no different rates and no priority anywhere in the product. Its whole value is that you can filter the list by it.

That makes it useful as a label for the accounts your team has agreed to treat as relationships rather than as plumbing, and it makes it dangerous to read as performance. In the screenshot above, Booking.com and Amex GBT are both flagged, but one of them has brought in seventeen bookings this quarter and the other has brought in none. If you want the sources that are actually producing, that is Source Production further down this page, or the production reports.

Finding one source

The right of the filter row: a search box reading Enter Search Terms, an Advanced button and a blue Export button. — Search when you know the name. Advanced when you do not.

Search. Runs as you type, a request per keystroke, and it does not wait for Enter. It matches more than the name: the contact, the source code, the type, the email, the phone number and the country code are all searchable, so agent brings back every travel agent and GB brings back the sources in the United Kingdom.
Advanced. Opens all four filters in one panel, with a count of how many are applied.
Export. Writes what you are looking at to a file. Covered at the end of this page.

Searching narrows what is already narrowed. The search box and the filters are sent together, so a chip left on the bar from ten minutes ago can hide a source that certainly exists.

The four filters

The Add filter popover open, listing four filters: Source Type, Country, Key Account and Source Production. — Four filters, and no filter for whether a source is a channel or a person.

Filter	What it does	Useful for
Source Type	Tick any number of your source types. Sources matching any ticked type are kept.	Seeing your OTAs as a group, or every travel agent at once.
Country	Tick one or more countries, matched against the country on the source.	Finding the agents in one market before a sales trip.
Key Account	Yes or No, one or the other. Clicking the option again unsets it.	Pulling the list of accounts your team owns.
Source Production	Highest Performing or Lowest Performing. Reorders rather than removes. See the next section.	Finding out which sources earn their commission and which do not.

The filter row with one chip reading Key Account Yes, a Clear all link beside it, and the table below narrowed to five sources. — An applied filter becomes a chip. Click the chip to change it, the cross to drop it.

Filters combine: set two and you get the sources that satisfy both. Each one leaves a chip on the bar that you can click to edit or cross out to remove, the number on Advanced counts what is applied, and changing anything takes you back to page one.

The Filters drawer open on the right, headed Filters and Refine the table. Under All filters, Source Type is a searchable checklist of OTA, Travel Agent, Corporate, Direct and GDS; Country is a checklist of eight countries; Key Account offers Yes and No; and Source Production sits at the foot of the panel, scrolled almost out of view. Clear all and Done sit at the bottom. — The same four filters in one panel. Source Type and Country take several values at once, which the chips cannot do.

Advanced opens the same four filters stacked in one panel, which is quicker when you are setting several. It is the same filter either way: a country ticked in the panel is a chip on the bar when you close it.

Highest and Lowest Performing

The Source Production filter open, offering two options, Highest Performing and Lowest Performing, with a Clear link and a Done button underneath. — Source Production reorders the whole list by what each source has actually brought in.

This one behaves differently from the other three. It removes nothing: the same sources stay in the list, reordered by the revenue attributed to each of them. Highest Performing puts your best producers on page one, Lowest Performing puts the sources you are maintaining for nothing there instead.

The count beside the heading therefore does not change when you apply it, which is the giveaway that it is a sort wearing a filter's clothes. Sources with no bookings at all sit at the bottom under Highest Performing, and they are the ones worth looking at: a source with a contact, a code and a contract, and nothing ever booked against it, is usually a source somebody set up and nobody ever selected.

For the figures behind the order, rather than just the order, open the source and read its History tab, described in The source profile and its production, or run the production reports from Finding a report and using its filters.

Sorting and paging

The foot of the table, reading 1 to 10 of 13 on the left, a Rows selector set to 10, and page buttons 1 and 2 on the right. — Thirteen sources over two pages. The Rows selector offers 5, 10, 50 and 100.

One column sorts, Name. Click the header once for A to Z and again for Z to A. The other eight headers do nothing when clicked.

Rows at the foot switches between 5, 10, 50 and 100 a page and returns you to page one. The range on the left counts what your filters matched, so it is the honest answer to "how many sources do we have".

Editing and deleting a source

The row menu on the Booking.com row, offering Edit and Delete, with Delete in red. — Two actions per source, and Edit is the only way in to the source profile.

Edit opens the source's own page, where the contact details, the company and address fields, the notes, the documents and the booking history all live. Nothing else on the row navigates: the name is not a link, and clicking the row does nothing at all.

A dialog headed Delete Confirmation asking whether you are sure that you want to delete this item, with Yes and No buttons. — The only warning you get. It does not say which source, and it does not say what happens to its bookings.

Delete asks once, in a dialog that does not name the source you are about to remove. Read the row before you open the menu, because the dialog will not remind you.

The row with no menu

Two rows at the foot of the table. Italiatour has a contact, an email, a phone number and a three dot menu at the end of the row. The Walk-in row below it shows dashes for email and phone and has no menu at all. — Walk-in is a system source. The empty Actions cell is the product refusing to let you edit or delete it.

Walk-in has no three dot menu. It is a system source: Prostay needs somewhere to attribute a booking taken from somebody standing at the desk, so the row cannot be renamed, edited or deleted, and because there is no Edit action there is no way to open it either. The dashes in its Email and Phone columns are correct rather than missing data; nobody to email is the point.

It still counts. Walk-in bookings appear in the production reports beside every other source, and its Source Type is Direct like your website, which is what makes the commission on those bookings nil.

Exporting the list

The Export Booking sources drawer, with the eight table columns listed under Available fields on the left, an empty Selected fields panel on the right, and Cancel and Export Now at the foot with Export Now greyed out. — Nothing is selected to begin with, so Export Now stays dead until you pick columns.

Filter the list to what you want first. The export carries your filters, your search and the page you are on, so set Rows to 100 if you want all of your sources rather than the ten in front of you.
Press Export. The panel opens with the eight columns on the left and nothing chosen on the right.
Click fields to move them across. Left to right adds, right to left removes, and Add all takes all eight. The order you add them is the column order in the file.
Press Export Now and choose a format. Export as PDF to hand to somebody, Export as Excel to work with. The file arrives as BookingSources.

There is no tick box on the rows here, so you cannot export a hand picked set of sources. The file is always whatever the list is currently showing you.

Things that catch people out

What you see	Why
No booking sources found for a source you are sure about	A filter chip is still applied, or there is still something in the search box. Clear all only clears the chips.
One row has no three dot menu	Walk-in is a system source and cannot be edited or deleted. Nothing is broken.
Clicking a source does nothing	By design. Edit in the row menu is the only way in.
The count beside the heading did not change when you filtered	You applied Source Production, which reorders the list instead of shortening it.
Sorting by Name did not put A at the top	It did, for the page you are on. The sort only reaches the rows already loaded.
A source flagged Key Account with no bookings	The flag is a label somebody applied, not a measure of production. The two are unrelated.
The commission is nowhere on this screen	Commission is a property of the Source Type, not of the source. The Source Type column is the pointer.