Who do I sue if the guest booked the room through a travel site?

Distribution changes who your counterparty is, and owners routinely get this wrong. Under a merchant-of-record arrangement, the platform takes the guest's payment, holds the customer relationship, and remits to you on its own terms. Your economic claim in that structure often runs against the platform under your supply agreement, not against the traveller, who may have no direct contract with your property at all. Under an agency or pay-at-property arrangement, the opposite is true: the platform introduced the booking, you charged the card, and the guest is squarely your counterparty.

Work out which one applies before you name a defendant, because suing the wrong party is expensive in a forum where you get two meaningful filings a year. Your extranet contract or the platform's partner terms will say who collects payment, and the folio itself is usually a tell, since a merchant-of-record booking shows a single platform remittance rather than a card authorisation in the guest's name. If the platform is the merchant of record, your remedy is usually a dispute inside its partner portal with a contractual deadline attached, which is a completely different process from a court filing and often much shorter.