channel-check

---
name: channel-check
description: Compares your property's listing on every platform you use, field by field, and produces the numbered list of contradictions to fix, with the total price stated the way the rules require and the licence or registration number where it has to appear. Use before a season starts, after any price or rule change, or when a guest arrives expecting something the other advert promised.
---

# The same property, the same facts, on every platform

You give this the live listings for one property, on every site it appears on, plus your own booking page if you have one. You get back one comparison table, a numbered list of every place two platforms say different things about the same property, the fields where a required number is missing from an advert, and the total price restated with every mandatory charge inside it. It changes nothing. It tells you exactly what to change and in which order.

## What it does

1. **Pull every live listing for one property and freeze them on the same day.** Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, your own website, the local agency, the Facebook page, the old PDF you still email. Capture each as it appears to a guest, with the date and time, because a comparison built from listings captured a fortnight apart will produce contradictions that are really just edits. Record the platform name, the listing URL or reference, and the capture timestamp at the top of the file. Anything you cannot capture is listed as "not captured" and stays on the list, because the advert you forgot about is the one the guest read.

2. **Break every listing into the same thirty fields before comparing anything.** Property name, address as shown, map pin, bedrooms, beds by type, bathrooms, maximum guests, minimum stay, check-in window, check-out time, cleaning fee, pet fee, extra guest fee, booking fee, tourist or city charge, deposit or damage policy, cancellation policy, pets, smoking, children, parties and events, stag and hen policy, parking, wifi speed, heating type, accessibility and stairs, EPC rating where required, licence or registration number, host or company name, and the cover photograph. Same fields, same order, one row per field, one column per platform. Anything not stated on a platform is recorded as blank, not as a no. Blank and no are different findings with different fixes.

3. **Flag every contradiction as its own numbered line, and say which value is true.** A contradiction is any field where two platforms give different values, or where one says something and another is silent on a fact a guest would act on. Sleeps six on one site and four on another. Pets welcome here, no pets there. Check-in from 3pm on one, 4pm on the other. For each, name the correct value and the evidence for it, which is usually the house manual, the licence or the actual bedroom count, not whichever advert was written last. Rank them by what causes an argument at the door: guest numbers, beds, pets, parking, stairs and check-in times come first, because those are the ones a guest turns up having relied on.

4. **Restate the price the way the rules now require, with every mandatory charge inside the headline.** The CMA's price transparency guidance, published 7 January 2026, is short and hard: "A charge is mandatory if the customer must pay it to buy the product", and "It's illegal to hide additional fees, taxes or other charges that the customer will have to pay until later in the purchase process." So work out, for a stated example stay, what a guest actually pays, and set that beside what each platform shows first. Cleaning fees, compulsory linen charges, booking fees and any unavoidable per-stay charge belong inside the total. The same guidance covers the case where you genuinely cannot calculate it in advance, for instance a charge that depends on party size: you must "give the customer the information they need to be able to calculate the total price themselves", with equal prominence. Produce one worked example, in pounds and pence, for a two-night and a seven-night stay.

5. **Check the required numbers are actually in the adverts, nation by nation.** In Scotland, the mandatory licence conditions require that any listing or advert "includes...the licence number", and mygov.scot adds that where an EPC is needed you must "display the EPC rating in all adverts for the accommodation". In Wales, registered providers receive "a unique registration number" and GOV.WALES states that from October 2026 anyone taking bookings for overnight stays must register, with registration to be completed "by 31 March 2027". Check each platform's listing for the number that applies where the property is, and flag every advert where it is absent, including the ones an owner forgets are adverts: the Facebook page, the email signature, the printed card in the local pub.

6. **Test the description against the photographs, one claim at a time.** Walk the description sentence by sentence and ask what photograph proves it. Sea view, walk to the beach, log burner, bath, garden, parking space, high chair, travel cot, dishwasher, air conditioning. Airbnb's terms put the duty on the host in plain words: "Your Listing must include complete and accurate information about your Host Service, your price (including any additional charges), and any rules or requirements that apply to your Guests or Listing", and the host is responsible for "keeping your Listing information (including calendar availability) and content (like photos) up-to-date and accurate at all times." Flag every claim with no photograph behind it and every photograph showing something the property no longer has, which is usually a sofa that was replaced or a garden that has since been paved.

7. **Screen for the omissions a guest would want, not just the errors.** The CMA's unfair commercial practices guidance defines material information as information "the average consumer needs to take an informed transactional decision", and treats leaving it out, presenting it unclearly, or disclosing it too late as a misleading omission. Applied to a short let, that is a short and predictable list: stairs and how many, no lift, a shared entrance, a busy road, building works nearby, single glazing, no parking, a two-mile walk to a shop, a ban on stag and hen groups, a noise curfew, and any camera on the outside of the property. Check each against every listing and flag the ones missing from any of them.

8. **Read what you have written about reviews and incentives, because that is a named banned practice.** The same CMA guidance covers a banned practice that prohibits submitting fake consumer reviews, concealing incentivised reviews, publishing reviews "in a misleading way", and failing to take "reasonable and proportionate steps" to prevent false or incentivised reviews. So flag anything in a listing or a guest message that offers a discount, a refund, a late checkout or a free bottle in exchange for a review, any quoted review you cannot point to on the platform it came from, and any review score displayed on your own website that no longer matches the platform it was taken from.

9. **Output the fix list in platform order with the wording to paste, and put the review date on it.** Group the numbered findings by platform, because an owner fixes one site at a time with the dashboard open. Each line carries the field, the current value, the correct value, and the exact text to paste. Put three fields at the top of every platform's list: total price, guest maximum, and the licence or registration number. Date the file, and set the next review for the day before the next season's rates go live, because every one of these contradictions was created by a change that only reached one platform.

## Then it checks

1. Every platform is captured on the same date, with a timestamp against each, and anything not captured is listed as "not captured" rather than omitted.
2. Every one of the thirty fields appears for every platform, with blanks recorded as blank rather than as a negative answer.
3. Every contradiction is a numbered line naming the field, each platform's value, the correct value, and the evidence for it, and no line resolves a contradiction by preferring the most recently edited advert.
4. The price section shows a worked total in pounds and pence for a two-night and a seven-night stay, with every mandatory charge inside the total, alongside what each platform shows first.
5. The licence or registration number required for the property's nation is checked on every listing, including non-platform adverts, and each absence is its own line.
6. Every descriptive claim in the listing is matched to a photograph or flagged as unevidenced, and nothing in the output states or implies that any listing is lawful or compliant.

Any check fails: name it, redo that step once. Failed twice: say what is wrong and stop.

## Rules
- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote.
- Anything sent in someone's name says whose name it is.
- Never resolve a contradiction by picking the value that sells better. The correct guest maximum is the one the licence or the fire risk assessment supports, and an advert that sleeps one more than the property is allowed to hold is not a marketing decision.
- Never edit a live listing from this work. It produces the list and the wording; a human with the dashboard open makes the change, so that one bad line cannot propagate to every platform at once.
- Never quote a review, a rating or an award you cannot open on the site it came from, and never write a listing line that offers anything in exchange for a review.
- Never treat a platform's own display of a fee as compliant just because the platform put it there. The duty to describe the property and its charges accurately sits with the host, and a platform's layout is not a defence the host can rely on.
- This output is a working document prepared for the owner's letting agent, solicitor or trading standards adviser to check before any listing is changed. It compares published text and states arithmetic. It is not legal advice and it does not certify that any advert complies with consumer protection law.

## Built from
- Competition and Markets Authority, "Providing clear and accurate information about prices: summary (CMA209)", https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/price-transparency-cma209/providing-clear-and-accurate-information-about-prices-summary, published 7 January 2026, read 14 September 2026: the mandatory charge test, the drip pricing prohibition and the calculate-it-yourself rule, which are the whole of step 4.
- Competition and Markets Authority, "Unfair commercial practices (CMA207)", https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/unfair-commercial-practices-cma207/unfair-commercial-practices, published 18 November 2025, read 14 September 2026: the material information definition behind step 7, and the banned practice on fake and incentivised reviews behind step 8.
- Airbnb, "Terms of Service", https://www.airbnb.co.uk/help/article/2908, read 14 September 2026: the host's duty to keep listing information, prices and photographs accurate at all times, which is the basis of step 6.
- The Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 (Licensing of Short-term Lets) Order 2022, Schedule 3, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ssi/2022/32/schedule/3/made, read 14 September 2026: the condition requiring the licence number in every listing or advert, checked in step 5.
- mygov.scot, "Legal requirements for short-term let accommodation", https://www.mygov.scot/short-term-let-licences/legal-requirements, last updated 9 October 2025, read 14 September 2026: the requirement to display the EPC rating in all adverts, also checked in step 5.
- GOV.WALES, "Registering visitor accommodation: overview", https://www.gov.wales/registering-visitor-accommodation-overview, last updated 14 July 2026, read 14 September 2026: the unique registration number and the October 2026 duty that step 5 checks for Welsh properties.

# channel-check

## You are given

Captured listings for ONE UK short-let property from two or more places: saved HTML, pasted text, a spreadsheet export, or the owner's own web page. Field names differ between platforms and nothing is normalised.

## Produce

Write these files into `./channel-check-output/`:

1. `comparison.csv` - columns exactly: `field,airbnb,booking,vrbo,own_site,other,correct_value,evidence,status`. One row for each of these thirty fields in this order: property_name, address_shown, map_pin, bedrooms, beds_by_type, bathrooms, max_guests, minimum_stay, checkin_window, checkout_time, cleaning_fee, pet_fee, extra_guest_fee, booking_fee, tourist_charge, damage_policy, cancellation_policy, pets, smoking, children, parties_events, stag_hen, parking, wifi_speed, heating_type, accessibility_stairs, epc_rating, licence_or_registration_number, host_name, cover_photo. Use the literal string `BLANK` where a platform says nothing. `status` is one of `MATCH`, `CONTRADICTION`, `MISSING_EVERYWHERE`, `MISSING_SOME`.
2. `fixes.csv` - columns exactly: `fix_id,priority,platform,field,current_value,correct_value,text_to_paste`. One row per change needed, grouped by platform. `priority` is 1 to 3, where 1 is total price, guest maximum and the licence or registration number, 2 is anything a guest arrives having relied on (beds, pets, parking, stairs, check-in), 3 is everything else.
3. `pricing.md` - for a two-night and a seven-night stay: every charge with its amount in pounds and pence, a TOTAL line, and what each platform displays first. End with every mandatory charge sitting outside a displayed headline.
4. `omissions.csv` - columns exactly: `item,present_on,absent_from,recommended_wording`. One row each for: stairs and how many, no lift, shared entrance, busy road, building works, single glazing, no parking, distance to nearest shop, stag and hen policy, noise curfew, exterior cameras.
5. `photo-claims.csv` - columns exactly: `claim,source_platform,photo_evidence,verdict`. One row per descriptive claim. `verdict` is `EVIDENCED`, `NO_PHOTO` or `PHOTO_CONTRADICTS`.
6. `captures.md` - platform, listing reference or URL, and capture timestamp per input, plus a `NOT CAPTURED` list.

## Rules

- Never edit, submit or publish anything. Output files only. No browser automation, no platform APIs, no logins.
- Never invent a price, fee or bed count. Use `BLANK`.
- Never resolve a contradiction by preferring the most recently edited advert. Give the evidence, or leave `correct_value` empty with `status` set to `CONTRADICTION`.
- Never write that a listing is compliant, lawful or in breach.
- British English. £ with pence. Dates DD Month YYYY. No em dash characters. No emoji.
- CSVs UTF-8, header row, comma separated, fields containing commas quoted.

## Return

The six file paths written, the number of platforms compared, the counts by `status`, the number of priority 1 fixes, and the two-night and seven-night totals. State that the output is a working document for the owner's letting agent, solicitor or trading standards adviser to check before any listing is changed, and is not legal advice.