Customer Story

The Watergate Hotel has recovered over $100k, including commissions on fraudulent bookings

Since early 2023, x·quic has found overcharged OTA commissions and uncollected virtual cards at one of Washington’s most recognizable properties, and stopped it paying commission on reservations that were never real.

Two leaks, one blind spot

Overcharged OTA commissions and uncollected virtual cards are separate problems with the same root cause: no system is responsible for checking whether what was billed matches what actually happened. The OTA invoices. The hotel pays. Nobody reconciles the two against the source record, line by line, every month.

At a property with the Watergate’s booking volume, even a small error rate compounds into real money.

The fraudulent reservation problem

There’s a harder version of this issue that most hotels never catch: commissions billed on fraudulent reservations. The booking is fake, the stay never happens, but the commission still lands on the invoice, and without line-level verification it gets paid like any other.

Catching those requires reconciling every reservation against what actually occurred at the property, at a level of detail no team has time to do manually.

The result: over $100k recovered

x·quic began working with the Watergate Hotel in early 2023. Since then, the property has recovered over $100,000 through overcharged OTA commissions and uncollected virtual cards, with AI-powered reconciliation finding every instance of OTA overcharging, including commissions billed against fraudulent bookings.

“Unfortunately, we are seeing a lot of fraudulent reservations and xquic makes sure that we don’t pay the OTAs any commissions on these reservations. They really have our back.”

Jay Nelliot · Chief Financial Officer, The Watergate Hotel