Your website isn’t the only place travelers shop. Marketplaces, online travel agencies, local tourism boards, and hotel concierges all sell tours and activities, and every one of them is a channel your business could be on. The catch has always been the plumbing: each channel wants its own integration, its own availability feed, its own way of sending you bookings. Most operators end up managing it by hand, with emailed spreadsheets, phone confirmations, and the ever-present risk of selling the same seat twice.
That’s the problem the new OCTO Channel Distribution plugin solves. Resytech now implements OCTO, the open connectivity standard for tours, activities, and attractions. You connect once, and any OCTO-compliant reseller can list your activities, check your live availability, and create bookings. No custom integration per channel, ever.
What is OCTO?
OCTO (Open Connectivity for Tourism Operators) is an industry-wide API standard backed by the major players in the tours-and-activities world. Instead of every booking system and every reseller building one-off connections to each other, everyone speaks the same language. For you, that means the work of “getting on a new channel” shrinks to a business conversation: agree on terms, hand over a credential, done. If the reseller speaks OCTO (and the big ones do), the technical side already works.
Live inventory, zero double-bookings
This is the part that matters on a busy Saturday. When a reseller checks availability, they see your real, current inventory, the same slots your own booking page sees. When they sell a departure, they first place a hold that blocks your inventory instantly, exactly like a pending booking: your booking page and every other reseller immediately see the slot as taken. If they don’t confirm within the hold window, the hold expires and the inventory frees itself automatically. No spreadsheets, no phone tag, no overselling.
Reseller bookings are just… bookings
When a reseller confirms a sale, it lands in your dashboard as a normal confirmed booking with the traveler’s contact details, stamped with the reseller’s booking source. Your booking-created workflows, notifications, and webhooks all fire like they would for any other booking. There’s no separate OCTO inbox to babysit.
- Payments stay accurate. The reseller collects payment from the traveler, and Resytech records it on the booking as an OTA payment, so the booking shows as paid and your balance and payment reports stay right.
- Cancellations reconcile themselves. If a reseller booking is cancelled, whether by them or by you, the recorded payment is automatically reversed, so your revenue reports never need a manual correction.
- Your commercial terms travel with every booking. If you have a revenue-share or markup arrangement with a reseller, link it once and every booking they create carries those terms automatically. Resellers who read prices through the API always see their prices: your rates with their markup already applied.
Your listings, straight from the source
Resellers can also pull your activity content: images, descriptions, duration, cancellation window, arrival notes, and your activity agreements. It’s the same material your own booking page shows, so keep your activity current in Resytech and every reseller’s listing stays current with it. Your activity’s custom fields travel as booking questions too: the reseller collects the answers in their checkout, and they land on the booking exactly as if the traveler had filled them in on your site.
You stay in control
Distribution only works if you can turn it off. Every reseller gets its own credentials, scoped to a single location, with permissions you choose: read-only availability, or full booking rights. From the plugin page you can pause a reseller (all their access stops on the next request), revoke a single credential when rotating, or disable the plugin entirely to cut every reseller off at once. Ending one relationship never touches the others.
Enabling it takes minutes
OCTO Channel Distribution is a feature plugin, so there are no credentials for you to enter. You create them and hand them to your resellers:
- Open Plugins → Browse Plugins and install OCTO Channel Distribution.
- Add a reseller for each distribution partner you have an agreement with.
- Issue an API token for the reseller and share it over a secure channel. It’s shown once, and only a hash is stored.
- Optionally link your commercial terms so their markup or revenue share applies to every booking automatically.
- Click Enable, and you’re live.
The OCTO plugin documentation walks through every step, including how holds, payments, and cancellations behave. If you’re a developer on the reseller side, an OTA or channel manager connecting to a Resytech operator, the full OCTO API reference covers authentication, endpoints, and the booking lifecycle. Existing OCTO clients should work unmodified.
If there’s a marketplace or agency you’ve been wanting to sell through, this is your green light. And if you hit a channel that needs something we don’t support yet, tell us. That’s how this feature got built in the first place.