What is a channel manager, and does a small motel need one?

What a channel manager does

Every OTA has its own extranet, where you set prices and how many rooms it may sell. Without a channel manager you keep each one up to date yourself. A channel manager does it from one place, in both directions:

• Out to the OTAs: rates, availability (how many rooms of each type are left) and restrictions such as minimum stay or closed to arrival — often shortened to ARI, for availability, rates and inventory
• Back into your PMS: new bookings, modifications and cancellations

Why it matters: the last room

Say you have one queen room left for Saturday, listed on Booking.com, Expedia and your own website. A guest books it on Expedia. Until every other site hears about it, they can still sell it — and a second guest turns up to no room. A channel manager closes that gap by pushing the new availability to every channel as soon as the booking lands. The shorter the delay, the smaller the risk.

No system can make overbooking impossible — an OTA can accept a booking before the update reaches it — so a good PMS also shows you, plainly, any booking that arrives without a free room, while there is still time to sort it out.

Mapping: the part that goes wrong

Each OTA has its own names and IDs for your rooms and rate plans. Mapping tells the channel manager which OTA room is which room type in your PMS, and which OTA rate is which rate plan. A missing or wrong mapping is the usual reason a price doesn’t update, or a booking doesn’t arrive where you expect it.

Built into the PMS, or separate?

A standalone channel manager sits between your PMS and the OTAs, with its own login, its own room set-up and often its own monthly fee. A channel manager built into the PMS uses the PMS’s own rooms and rates, so there is one place to change a price and one calendar where bookings land.

Either can work. What matters is how quickly updates go out, how clearly mapping problems are shown, and whether OTA bookings land straight on your calendar.

What to check before you choose

• Which channels it connects to — and whether yours are among them
• How fast a change reaches the OTAs: seconds or minutes
• Whether restrictions (minimum stay, closed to arrival or departure, stop sell) go out as well as rates
• How it handles OTA virtual cards (VCCs), and where the card numbers are kept
• Whether you can set a price adjustment per channel to cover commission
• What it costs: per property, per channel, or included in the PMS

Does a small motel need one?

If you sell on a single OTA and change prices a few times a year, you can manage its extranet by hand. Once you are on two or more — Booking.com and Expedia, say — or you price by day of the week or season, the time saved and the double bookings avoided make a channel manager worth having. One that is included in the PMS takes the cost question away.

How HotelOne does it

HotelOne’s channel manager is built in, through Channex. It connects to more than 50 channels, including Booking.com, Expedia and Wotif, Agoda, Airbnb, Trip.com, Hotelbeds, Bookeasy and Google Hotel Ads. Rates, availability and restrictions reach the channels within about 30 seconds of a change; bookings, changes and cancellations come back onto the calendar; OTA virtual cards go into the card vault; and a booking that arrives while its room type is full waits in the Unassigned rows, where the front desk can see it. Each channel can carry its own price adjustment, and the channel report shows commission and net revenue per channel. It is all included in the PMS price.

Questions

Is a channel manager the same as a booking engine?

No. A booking engine takes bookings on your own website; a channel manager keeps the OTAs in step with your PMS. HotelOne has both, sharing the same rooms and availability.

Does a channel manager change my OTA contracts or commission?

No. Your agreement and commission with each OTA stay as they are; the channel manager only replaces the manual updates in each extranet.