Will a hotel booking made on my portal reach the hotel straight away, or does someone have to confirm it by hand?

Most of the time yes, a hotel booking made on your portal goes through to the hotel straight away, but there are rates where it does not.

When a room is sold on what the industry calls instant confirmation, your customer pays, the booking is sent on to the supplier while they are still on the page, and a confirmation number comes back within seconds. That number is the hotel's own reference, so the room is held in the hotel's system from that moment and your customer can travel on the voucher without anyone in your office doing anything else.

Some rooms are sold on request instead. Here the booking is only a request until the hotel replies, and the reply can come back quickly or, at smaller properties and in busy season, take a good deal longer. Your portal should show these bookings with a clearly different status, and your staff should not send out a voucher or treat the room as held until that status changes to confirmed. Whether a hotel is instant or on request is decided by the supplier and the contract sitting behind that rate, so the same hotel can be instant through one supplier and on request through another.

Open a recent hotel booking in your portal and look at the status and the supplier reference recorded against it, and ask each of your hotel suppliers which of their rates are sold on request, so your staff know which bookings still need watching before the customer travels.