Affiliates — earn bookings through partner referrals

Give partners — hotels, travel agents, freelance instructors — a personal booking link and QR code, and pay them a commission on the bookings they send you.

When you'd use this

• A nearby hotel recommends your centre to guests and you want to reward them per booking.
• A travel agent sells your courses and you owe them a percentage.
• A freelance instructor brings their own students and earns a referral fee.

Before you start

• Your public booking page must be switched on (Settings → Booking Page) so affiliate links have somewhere to land.
• You need the Affiliates permission — managers and owners have it by default. Approving and paying commissions needs Edit access.

Add an affiliate

1. Open Affiliates in the sidebar (under People) and press Add affiliate.
2. Pick a Type first — it decides what you fill in:
   • Hotel, Travel agent, Freelancer or Other (an outside partner): enter their Name and Email.
   • Team member (one of your own staff): choose them from the list. Their name, email and phone come from their profile, and they're linked to their staff login automatically — so their earnings show up for them under My Referrals straight away. Staff only appear once they have a login, and each can be a partner only once.
3. Set the Commission rate (%) — their share of each referred booking's total.
4. Optionally set a Customer discount (%) — a discount the customer gets when they book through this partner (see "Give customers a discount" below). Leave it at 0 for none.
5. Optionally set a Link code — leave it as auto to have one made from the partner's name, or type your own (lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, 4–24 characters, e.g. seaside-hotel). If the code is already used by another partner, you'll be asked to pick a different one.
6. Press Create affiliate. Their link code is generated here. It's best set once and left alone so printed QR codes keep working — but you can change it later if you need to (see below).

Change a partner's link code

You can rename a partner's code after creation, but it's guarded on purpose — changing it breaks every link, QR code and printed poster already shared for that partner, and the old code stops working immediately.

1. Open the affiliate and, in the Affiliate link & QR code card, press Change link code.
2. Read the warning, then type the current code to confirm (a safety check).
3. Enter the new code (lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, 4–24 characters). If it's already used by another partner, you'll be asked to pick a different one.
4. Press Change code. The link and QR update to the new code. Re-share or reprint anything the partner is using.

Share their link and QR code

1. Open the affiliate from the list.
2. In Affiliate link & QR code, use Copy link, Download PNG (the QR image) or Print A4 poster — a ready-to-print poster the partner can put on their front desk.
3. Anyone who books through that link is credited to the affiliate automatically.

Link vs code. There are two ways a customer can be credited to a partner:

• The link (or QR code) — clicking it lands the customer on your booking page with the partner already applied. Best for websites, emails and posters.
• The referral code (e.g. seaside-hotel) — the customer types it into the "Have a referral code?" box on your booking page. Best when a partner just tells someone in person. Both do the same thing; the code is shown next to the link everywhere the partner sees it.

How long a click lasts. After someone clicks a partner's link (or types their code), that partner stays credited for 7 days, even if the customer comes back later to finish booking without clicking again. If a customer clicks two different partners' links, the most recent one is the one that gets credited. A typed code always beats a clicked link. You can always change or remove the credit by hand before approving it (see below).

Give customers a discount

A partner's referral can also give the customer money off — useful when a hotel wants to offer its guests a perk.

1. Set a Customer discount (%) on the affiliate (when adding them, or edit it later).
2. Now, when a customer books through that partner's link or code, the discount comes off their whole order automatically, and a "Referral discount" line shows on their booking.
3. The partner's commission is worked out on the discounted total. The partner sees "Customers enter this at checkout for X% off" on their own screen, so they can advertise it.
4. Leave the discount at 0% for partners who only earn commission with no customer perk.

Credit a booking by hand

Not every referred customer books online — some message you on WhatsApp or walk in saying "the hotel sent me".

1. Open the booking (or add a new one) and find the Referred by field.
2. Pick the affiliate. The commission is worked out automatically from the booking total.
3. The field only appears once you have at least one active affiliate.

Approve and pay commissions

1. On the affiliate's page, the Referrals table shows one row per referred booking with its commission.
2. A commission stays Pending while the booking can still change — it follows the booking total automatically.
3. Press Approve when you're happy with it (this locks the amount). If the booking has no price yet, set the price first.
4. When you're ready to pay, press Pay and pick how you settled (bank transfer, cash, and so on). DiveOps records it as one Marketing expense in your books (and syncs it to your accounting integration if you have one connected), so your commission spend is tracked automatically. You can email the partner a payout statement from the payout history.
5. Void cancels a commission at any point. If a booking is cancelled, its commission voids itself; if something changes after you've approved or paid, the row is flagged review so nothing changes silently. Voiding a paid commission asks whether you actually recovered the money, and reverses your books to match.

Give an affiliate their own login (the affiliate portal)

Affiliates can log in to a simple portal showing only their own link, code, QR code, visit counts, referrals, earnings and payouts — never your customers, bookings or finances. They are not team members.

1. Open the affiliate and find the Portal access card.
2. Press Send portal invite — they receive an email with a 6-digit code, set a password, and land in their portal.
3. For your own staff, the easiest route is to add them as a Team member partner in the first place (above) — that links their login automatically. If a staff member was added as an outside partner earlier, use Link to team member to connect their login instead. Either way they get a My Referrals page (under ME in the sidebar) with their own link, code, QR, poster, earnings and payouts — no separate portal needed.
4. Remove access cuts their portal login at any time (their history is kept).

Pause, archive or delete an affiliate

• Pause stops their link crediting new bookings (you can resume any time). Top-right of the Details card.
• Archive retires them — their history and past commissions are kept, and you can Restore them later from the same spot.
• Delete affiliate (in the Danger zone at the bottom of their page) permanently removes a partner — but only while they have no referral or booking history. Once they've referred anything, archive is the way to retire them; their commission records are never lost.

Tips

• The commission rate applies to NEW referrals only; already-recorded commissions keep the rate they were created with.
• The visits chart on each affiliate's page shows how often their link is being opened — a good early signal before bookings arrive.