If you’re a hotel owner who gets reservations for your rooms from different online travel agencies (OTAs) and booking websites, but you’re having trouble keeping track of the rate, availability, and inventory of your rooms all at once in real time.
The manual mishandling of reservations from multiple channels results in issues such as excessive reservations, inconsistent inventory management, and missed opportunities.
Then, it’s time to manage your bookings using Channel Manager.
A Channel Manager is a centralized software that synchronizes your room inventory, rates, restrictions, and bookings of room types & rate plans with connected OTA channels and PMS across all connected online distribution channels.
This implies that the channel manager will update your inventory on all of your connected channels, including Expedia and Agoda, and send this data to your PMS whenever a room is reserved, for instance, on Booking.com.
Through this process, your hotel’s inventory will always be accurate and up-to-date, reducing your risk of double-bookings and eliminating human error. You’ll also be able to control any updates and analyse the performance from one central dashboard.
Let’s now understand a few of the Channel Manager features so that you can select the right one with ease.
Many features of the Channel Managers will convince you why it is important to use the right Channel Managers to grow your business.
Considering the importance of Channel Managers, we have introduced you to some of the following features here:
A channel manager should be integrated directly into the property management system. This allows reservations to flow directly into the PMS.
It helps to transmit real-time prices and availability to the revenue management system.
Such integration functions enable the automatic exchange of information about new bookings between different sales channels and the hotel’s reservation system.
A strong real-time dashboard is a must for any manager of channels. It provides an intuitive and analytical dashboard that delivers useful data on channel and room type statistics, new bookings, total channels and room plans.
The platform should need to be simple and must enable with the automated portal configuration.
This feature simplifies the process of updating room-rates across multiple channels simultaneously with just one action, ensuring consistency and efficiency in managing pricing strategies. It is a tool for rate adjustments across various platforms.
You can monitor visitors and their payment habits with automatic updates about payments and payment status. In addition to being able to see who has paid and estimate how much money you should make, you can personalise your payment options based on what your guests prefer to use.
Select a channel manager who offers thorough reporting and analytics. You can create a distribution strategy with the use of information on revenue per channel, booking volume, total revenue for a given period of time, competitive analysis, and parity rate.
It can be accessible from anywhere and by anyone. It should be available in the cloud and compatible with all other devices.
This accessibility allows certain users to log in using browsers from anywhere with an internet connection. Your device must have a stable internet connection.
It must be well considered and adhere to all guidelines. Additionally, the hotelier need to have a consistent mobile experience.
When a booking or cancellation request originates from any platform, all lists are automatically maintained across all OTAs to prevent duplicate bookings.
To avoid missing bookings, you can set up notifications for new bookings and check the dashboard regularly for missed entries.
As this is a real-time dashboard, users can see all transactions in one place and spot errors immediately, reducing the likelihood of mistakes.
Since not all channel managers are the same, they differ for many reasons, including their features, user interface design, customer support, pricing models and more.
With a reliable channel manager, you can manage bookings, prices, room prices, guest data, text and images on the websites.
To make sure you have the right channel manager, you need to examine its specific features and functions. And for that, it is necessary to understand why every hotel needs a channel manager.
I hope this blog will give you an understanding of the functions of a channel manager.
Now you can manage bookings, rates and guest data more effectively and easily with a reliable channel manager.
Find the best channel manager for your business growth in the Hotel Industry,
I recommend you to visit our site for Channel Manager.
To set up the channels and synchronise them with the channel’s account, follow the instructions with the help of our another blog QloApps Channel Manager.
In case of any issue, query, or need anything please feel free to raise it on the QloApps Forum.
For any technical help, please raise a ticket.
