Can I send rates and availability and pause OTAs

In short, yes you can. 

If you go to Administration > Channel Management and have the appropriate access rights, you will see the below screenshot at the top of the page. 

Pressing these orange/yellow buttons will trigger an update to be sent to the online distribution channels that you are connected to (i.e. OTAs such as Booking.com and Expedia). 

By default, we send this for an 18 month period, to prevent us "flooding" your third parties with too much data in too short an amount of time, however you can choose to send updates for a specific date range if you are concerned about a certain period (as long as it is no more than 18 months into the future).

You also now have the option to pause your OTA connections as you please. If you scroll down to 'Channels' and your OTA is already connected, you will see the 'Pause' button as circled below. 

This might be useful if you want to take a break from your OTAs and want to cater for direct bookings only for a period of time (after all this means no commission fees). Therefore, you can pause the connections and activate them again when you're ready. The 'Pause' button will turn into an 'Activate' button when you press it. 

Points to note

• This functionality does not need to be used on a regular basis, as Hop sends updates to your connected channels whenever key events take place (e.g. reservation creation, reservation cancellation, rate changes and so on).
• The 'Update Property Data' button does not need to be used for most OTAs. It is a requirement of our connection with Google Hotels, as they require additional information to be sent to them such as room descriptions and photos that other channels do not.