Everything Edinburgh hoteliers want to know about NovaBid

Your share, less our 12% commission (10% for founding partners), is released to you at the moment of booking, and Stripe Connect settles it to your bank on your account schedule, usually within 7 days, never weeks after checkout. The guest has usually not arrived yet. That timing is the difference. Every channel we have benchmarked pays after the guest has left: from 7 days after the event to 45 days after departure, and only after their own invoice cycle. We pay at booking because the business has already paid us. The twenty-second example above shows the whole thing. You'll see expected and actual payouts inside your Hotel Settings → Payout tab, and you have direct access to your Stripe Express dashboard from there for full visibility into incoming transfers, tax forms, and bank-account changes.

NovaBid runs one cancellation rule across every booking, so the business always knows where it stands and you never have to explain your own policy. - More than 48 hours before check-in: the business cancels for a full refund, and no commission is charged. - Within 48 hours of check-in: the payment stands and you are paid in full for holding the room. Commission applies as normal. - No-show: treated exactly like a cancellation inside 48 hours. You keep the booking value, less commission. We hold this rule at platform level rather than per offer because a single, predictable promise is what makes a business comfortable pre-paying a hotel it has not used before.

Neither Booking.com nor Expedia publishes its commission rate, so we are not going to quote you one. What they do confirm is that the rate varies by property, that visibility programmes raise it above whatever is in your contract, and that their payment products carry their own fees on top. Your own rate is in your extranet under Finance, then Reservation statements. Ours is 12%, or 10% for founding partners, and we never mark up or pad the rate you set. For away days and team offsites the commission is agreed in writing with each venue before the event is confirmed. We can sustain 12% because we don't run pay-per-click ads, we don't pay Google millions for hotel-meta placement, and our SMB customer is opting in directly. It's a fundamentally different model than scaling traffic via Google paid search.

No. There is no rate parity clause in our hotel agreement. You set every offer yourself, at whatever rate makes sense for the corporate demand in front of you, and offers are private to the business that asked, so nothing you quote here touches your public rates. You are NOT exclusive to NovaBid. Run us alongside whatever else you already use.

About 15 minutes a week, after a one-time 20-minute setup. - Setup (one time): create your hotel profile, complete Stripe onboarding, set your default cancellation policy and amenities. ~20 minutes. - Per request: when an SMB request matches your city, you get an email + in-app notification. Click in, set room type + price + amenities, hit submit. ~2 minutes per offer. - We are early, so we will be straight with you: expect a handful of relevant requests a month at first, growing as more businesses post trips. Bid on the ones that fit, ignore the rest.

Stripe automatically generates VAT-compliant payout statements you can download from your Express dashboard. NovaBid issues a monthly commission statement for your records; the commission has already been deducted from your payouts, so there is nothing further to pay. The SMB invoice for the booking comes from us, with your hotel listed as the underlying service provider, this is standard marketplace VAT treatment in the UK and meets HMRC's documentation requirements. Your accountant will recognise the format.

Yes, guest name, email, phone, check-in time (if specified), and any special requests come through the moment booking is confirmed. You also get a confirmation code (e.g. NB-7KQ4MX) that the guest will reference at check-in. If you need to contact the guest before arrival (room ready early, parking instructions, etc.) you can email them directly. We don't sit between you.

The strongest protection is structural: the business pays in full by card through Stripe before a booking is confirmed. No booking reaches you unpaid, so there is nothing to invoice and nothing to chase. We are early and deliberately small, so every account on the platform is reviewed by hand rather than waved through. If a guest no-shows or causes damage, we hold the booking company's details and act as your first line of dispute support.

Three steps, ~20 minutes total: 1. Request an invitation at novabid.co.uk/founding-partners. We check ownership at Companies House, then send you a private signup link. 2. Get verified, we manually review every hotel within 24 hours to make sure NovaBid SMBs only see legitimate accommodation. (We're tightly hand-picked at launch in Edinburgh.) 3. Complete Stripe Connect onboarding inside your dashboard's Settings → Payout tab. This takes ~10 minutes (ID verification + bank details, all handled by Stripe directly, we never touch your bank info). Once all three are done you'll start seeing SMB trip requests for Edinburgh in your dashboard. You can submit your first offer the same day.