About OTA Ninja

You should not need to become a spreadsheet detective just to understand where your own money went.

I work in the tour industry here in Japan and deal with OTAs as part of everyday life.

They are great at bringing customers through the door.

The payout side of things can be another story.

I kept finding myself looking at an invoice, then a payment confirmation, then my bank account and thinking:

Hang on. Where did that bit go?

Then the detective work would begin.

Booking references. Cancellations. Commission rates. Adjustments. Different totals. Another spreadsheet open. Then another one.

Not exactly why I got into the tour business.

OTA Ninja started because I got fed up doing this manually.

It was never meant to be a big software project. It was a passion project I started building for myself, with one very simple goal:

Make sure I was getting the money I had earned.

I wanted to drop in my OTA files, follow the money from the booking through to the bank, and see where something had changed without spending half the evening trying to piece it together.

So that is what I started building.

Bit by bit, I added the things I actually wanted when checking my own payouts: where the difference appeared, what might have caused it, which bookings deserved a closer look, and something useful to take back to the OTA if I needed to question it.

OTA Ninja came from a real problem I kept having myself.

And really, the idea behind it is still the same one I started with:

I earned the money. I just want to make sure I got it.

If OTA Ninja saves you time and helps you catch even one thing you might otherwise have missed, then it has done its job.