A channel manager is a technology solution for accommodation providers such as B&Bs, hotels, motels etc that will eventually help the way they sell rooms online.
This technology is a solution to a problem that plagues many hoteliers in today’s online marketplace. With travellers continuing with online method to book travel, B&B operators need to react to and manage this trend with a channel manager. It’s the only way to efficiently and effectively stay on top of incoming online reservations.
While promoting hotel rooms through various online channels – such as online travel agents and your own website – the task of constantly updating and adjusting your listings feels like a nightmare, and a channel manager can help solve the problem.
channel manager had been developed in the recent years to improvise the hotel’s booking and boost its online presence. A hotel Channel Manager is a software which updates the rates and inventory of a hotel directly to major OTAs and pools reservations accordingly, making it comfortable for the hotel to offer its rooms online, and avoiding overbooking and rate parity problems.
A hotel channel manager software provides a unique platform to properties for managing and handling their distribution across various platforms. Whenever bookings are recorded from any one channel, it would automatically update the latest rates and bookings on all the channels.
To be more specific, the major functions of the channel manager include updating the hotel details such as rate plans, rates and availability on different linked platforms.
Thus, to fetch bookings, channel manager uses two ways: One-way connectivity in which the channel manager pushes only the rates and inventory on various channels, but do not fetch bookings from the platform. Two-way connectivity, in which OTAs fetches the bookings, along with pushing rates and inventory.
Besides handling inventory and rate plans, a channel manager benefits hotels in many other ways.
The channel manager simplifies the entire hotel management and is a true benefit to hotels. It helps various operations of hotel, such as:
With a channel manager in place, a lot of manual efforts and time invested can be saved. The entire hotel channel manager is handled smoothly by the software; and all you need to do is sit back and relax.
A channel manager consist a wide range of features built to offer you a unique distribution process.
The channel manager can bring your competitors rates right in the system with channel manager tool. Thus, it gets the real-time rates of your competitors directly in the hotel distribution system. Consequently, It helps you figure out the best pricing plan for your hotel.
The channel manager can provide you a detailed summary of your business performance. Thus, you can track the better-performing channels, non-performing ones, total bookings, and many other details. By reading these metrics, you can make changes in your OTA connections and make important decisions.
While hotels are listed on different channels to sell their inventory and register bookings, a channel manager shows live rates and availability on all the channels simultaneously. After receiving a booking, it automatically updates your room availability and rates on the other sites.
Many OTAs consider few selected channel managers as their preferred partner, based on a wide range of parameters. Few of them are zero downtime, stable connectivity, and fewer errors.
There are various channel manager software present in the market. For selecting the right channel, the most important parameters are your requirements and your property type. At first, start listing down your requirements and then research about the vendors offering channel manager. Select at least 3 to 5 channels that fit your requirement. After a free trials, choose the one that suits you the best.
In today’s modern era, most operations of daily life can be performed from your smartphone. Similarly, you can also take control over your online channel manager through your mobile.
Promoting your hotels on multiple online channels is a major problem. An advanced channel manager can help you to solve this issue to a great extent. It allows you to sell all your rooms on all your connected channels simultaneously.
To guarantee a smooth operation of the channel manager system, the investment in the required technology is a must. With manual channel manager, you may face many problems like rate disparity, underbooking and overbooking. To avoid this, it is worth to invest and grow your business.
Hotels that provide accommodation services and are listed on various travel sites can use a channel manager to simplify their inventory distribution.