A hotel has not paid your commission. Do these, in this order.

First, is it actually late?

Hotels that pay through a clearing house pay, on average, 39 to 42 days after the guest checks out. Properties outside a network take far longer, around 140 days, and only about half of hotels pay by direct debit at all (Onyx CenterSource figures, August 2026). So a commission that is four weeks late is not yet a problem. One that is eight weeks past checkout is.

If the guest cancelled, no-showed, or the stay was changed at the desk, the booking you tracked may have been re-issued under a new confirmation number. Check the folio date and number before you write.

Then, check the three places it goes missing

1. The clearing house portal

   If the hotel pays through Onyx CenterSource, sign in to the payments portal and search the booking. A claim can be “In Process”, “Refused”, or paid under a payment reference you have not matched yet (the agency user guide shows the statuses). A refused claim carries a reason, and that reason is what your message to the hotel should answer.

2. Your own identifier on the booking

   The commission was paid to whichever IATA, CLIA or TIDS number was on the reservation. A digit wrong, or a host agency’s number instead of yours, and the money went somewhere real. Ask the hotel which agency number the reservation carried before you ask why it was not paid.

3. The rate code

   Many rates are non-commissionable by design: packages, member rates, some promotional codes, and anything booked on a corporate or wholesale contract. Large chains publish their rules (Marriott’s commission FAQ is a good example). If the rate you booked was not commissionable, the claim will not be paid, and the fix is in how you book, not in who you write to.

Write one message that can be paid

Send it to the property’s accounting or accounts payable address, not to the sales manager who took the booking. Include, for each booking on one line: the hotel confirmation number, guest name, arrival and departure dates, the commissionable rate, the agreed commission percentage, the amount you expected, what you received (and under which payment reference), and the difference. Then ask for either payment or the reason each line was paid as it was.

A message with those fields is keyed into a payment run. A message that says “we have not received commission for several stays in March” is answered with a question, and goes to the bottom of the pile.

Escalate on a schedule, not on frustration

• Around 60 days after checkout with no answer: resend to accounts payable, and copy your consortium or host agency’s supplier relations contact if you have one. Hotels answer a consortium faster than an agency.
• Around 90 days: submit the case to ASTA’s Hotel Watch List. ASTA publishes the properties that do not pay and has recovered more than $45,000 for members in its first eight months, across 162 cases (TravelPulse). You do not have to be the loudest agency; you have to be on the list.
• For a large balance: a commission recovery service such as Onyx RecoverPro will chase it for a share of what comes back. Worth it for a backlog, expensive as a habit.
• Then stop booking the property, and tell your clients why when they ask. A hotel that owes you money and has lost your bookings is a hotel that finds the money.

Stop it happening across every booking

The hotel that did not pay this one probably did not pay others, and you only noticed this one. The fix is not to chase harder; it is to compare every booking’s expected commission against what actually arrived, every month, so the short-paid ones surface themselves. The full method is on one page. MarginShield does the comparison from the booking export you already have, lists every shortfall by hotel, and tracks each claim to money in the account.