Features & Benefits of Hotel Channel Manager

Nowadays, there are a lot of hotel owners who sign up for online booking platforms to optimize their profit. However, it could be very difficult to manage all online booking platforms and update their room inventory in real-time. This is when the channel manager plays an important role to hoteliers.

Read also: 7 Reasons Why Hotels Should Invest in a Channel Manager

Read more about Hotel Channel Manager

What is a Hotel Channel Manager?

A hotel channel manager refers to a technology solution that helps hoteliers simultaneously manage their inventory, room rates and maximize the room sales across multiple platforms such as Booking.com, Agoda, Expedia, Trip Advisor, and so on. This is more effective than manually updating each booking channel. Therefore, hotel owners could better spend their time on more value-added tasks such as Hotel Marketing, client engagement, and on-site services.

Features of a Hotel Channel Manager Software

As features are relative and subjective, it is best to have an idea of what you want to achieve before deciding on the features that will best help you achieve your goals. If you only need to manage three channels, a simple channel manager will suffice. If you have 20 or more channels, it is best to go with a more feature-rich solution.

Read also: How to Choose the Right Channel Manager for Hotels

The key features of the channel manager are:

• Maintaining all your connected booking sites 
• Two-way connectivity with OTAs
• Allowed to push rates and inventory across all channels as well as retrieving bookings from the channel.
• Seamless with existing hotel systems (PMS, CRM, RMS)
• Providing analytics and reporting (Able to analyze top channel performance)
• Providing pooled inventory models on all booking platforms to maximize your property’s sales
• Customizing and setting room rates, plans, availability, and restriction
• Integrating with new booking sites to grow sales
• Rate conversion for foreign currency
  
  

Benefits of using Hotel Channel Manager

A channel manager benefits hotels in many ways:

• Overcome the risk of overbooking and double booking
• Overbooking is less likely to occur because the channel manager updates inventory and rates in the shortest amount of time on OTAs.
• At the same time, it allows you to make the best use of your inventory. As a result, none of your rooms will be vacant.
  
  
• Minimize human data entry error
• As you may manually log into the extranets of all your connected OTAs if you do not have a channel manager. You have to be extremely quick and accurate while updating the room inventory. Therefore, higher chances of human error.
• If you have a channel manager, all of these issues can be resolved simply by entering your property information once, then the system will do the job of updating the rates and inventory. Hence, there are fewer chances of error when the entire channel management process is automated.
  
  
• Save times (Automation)
• Since the channel management system is automated, a lot of manual work and time invested in updating information is saved.
  
  
• Expanded hotel’s reach
• Hotels can sell their rooms at maximum OTA connections. It can help the hotel to increase revenue and bookings. In fact, you can reach a larger audience by connecting to local and regional OTAs or hotel global distribution systems (GDS). This can significantly help you to reach guests globally. 
  
  
• Maintain rate parity
• Channel manager systems ensure that any rate changes you make are updated across all channels in real-time. Therefore, all distribution channels will have a consistent rate for a similar room type. As could eliminate the possibility of rate disparity issues.
   
• Increase Online Bookings
• Channel Manager can help to increase online bookings because it can connect to all channels that you want to and expose your hotel to the world.
   
• Increase hotel’s operational efficiency
• With the help of a channel manager, you can manage multiple channels from your dashboard with a single click.
• This allows you and your staff to spend more time on other hospitality tasks that require greater attention such as client engagement and on-site services.
  
  
• Keep your inventory up to date
• Channel Managers can keep track of the latest room availability and then keep guests informed of any changes in the update. 
  
  

Conclusion

The actual fact is that you and your hotel are no longer merely competing with other successful business owners. You are now directly competing with advanced forms of machine learning that analyze massive amounts of data, determine precisely the right allocation, the right rate, and the best time for a specific guest to be most likely to make a reservation.

Therefore, we can take the advantage of Channel managers, to help hoteliers to post room availability across multiple channels autonomously, pool their inventory, ensure rate parity compliance, and expose your hotel to a global clientele across the individual sales channels. If you are interested in Channel Manager, let’s have a look at our Hotel Channel Manager.