With so many commission-based online booking sites vying for your availability these days it’s sometimes hard to know which sites to try. With a high-performance channel manager you don’t need to worry – send your availability out to as many sites as you like without worry about overbooking your rooms.
Most channel managers are web based, however the major ones also connect to some PMS (Property Management System on your office computer).
Channel Manager Capabilities
Channel managers allow you to adjust prices, availability and stop sells across multiple sites with one easy process. You can also add inclusions across your booking sites all through one place.
When a booking comes in through any of the booking sites that you connect to your channel manager automatically updates the availability across all the other booking sites, thereby avoiding overbooking senarios.
Most channel managers also provide you with stats on your bookings and connect to the booking engines that run on your company website.
Some more sophisticated capabilities of some channel managers include mapping master rooms to more than one room type with the ability to link availability based on the master room. For example you may have one room called ROOM A which is sold either with or without breakfast. Via your channel manager you can establish 2 rooms for display and linking online ROOM A and ROOM A WITH BREAKFAST. When one is sold the other is automatically sold at the same time. You can stop-sell individual room types on certain days of the week or date ranges to control your yield. This might also work for special packages or promotions or weekend versus weekday rates which have different inclusions.
Don’t Forget
At the end of the day the job of the channel manager is to make your life easier, less stressful and to improve the online reach of your business.
Remember that you still need to do the initial set up for each of the online booking sites.