Have you ever imagined how does the revolution of technology influences room occupancy, hotel revenues, and guest experience? How does the Property Management System (PMS) optimize hotel management?
To understand how technology and the Internet influence the day-to-day functioning of a hotel, it is important to realize the connections between the key components of the data flow chain, namely the PMS, Online Travel Agent (OTA), and Channel Manager.
What is OTA
OTA stands for Online Travel Agency, and its role is to provide traffic to hotels since they are on top of the search engine results page for just about any travel-related keyword. OTAs are the winner at the online marketing game and you can’t beat them. It's important to make them your partner and increase your hotel visibility.
Some of the well-known travel websites are:
- Agoda
- TripAdvisor
- Booking.com
- Expedia
If you would like to have more ideas about the OTAs' strategies, how much they charge, and so on, we had compiled an Ultimate Guide to Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) e-book here. Feel free to download them.
Then now imagine the hotel needs to manage more than 3 OTAs? Here comes Channel Manager to help make day-to-day management easier.
What is Channel Manager
A Channel Manager is a system that helps you to sync your hotel room allotment and price to all your OTA platforms. Each time there is a booking made through OTA or other sales channels, the information will be updated. This is crucial to avoid the risk of overbooking or double booking. On top of that, it saves you a lot of time, you don’t have to log in to each OTA dashboard in order to update room inventory and rate.
Channel Manager will help you to:
- Automatically update room inventory and rate
- No more split inventory. Sell your maximum inventory and get more chances to increase revenue
- Eliminate the risk of overbooking
- Maintain rate parity issue
- Save time and reduce manpower costs
- Keep away the hassle of human errors
It is not necessary for you to choose a Channel Manager vendor that is connected to all OTAs around the world. As long as they can connect to all OTAs that you use, then it should be fine even though those Channel Manager vendors might connect to less than 30 channels.
Read also: The best Hotel Channel Manager
What is PMS
A Property Management System (PMS) is one of the most important tools required to run a hotel business efficiently.
The main role of a PMS is:
- Store information on hotel bookings
- Store information on the current number of available rooms
- Accept new incoming bookings
PMS updates the most recent data on room availability to a Channel Manager, which is then directed to all OTAs connected with the Channel Manager. If there’s a booking made in one of the channels, PMS gets informed by Channel Manager and enters the booking information straight into the calendar.
Hotel PMS, Channel Manager and OTAs. How does it work?
A Channel Manager is supposed to work together with PMS. It allows you to manage your daily hotel operations and room distribution across all the OTAs.
Let’s walk through the process below:
- Guest make a new booking through one of your OTA channels
- Then, OTA update to Channel Manager
- Channel Manager will send the booking details to PMS
- The remaining number of rooms available will be automatically updated by Channel Manager across all OTA channels
Conclusion
Improving hotel operation on managing OTAs can ease your hotel management process and enhance guests' experience.
As a hotelier, it is critical to focus on two things: adding PMS and Channel Manager to your hotel operation and utilizing them to their full potential hence smoothening your management process. Second, to find the best PMS and Channel Manager to assist you in managing more than 3 OTAs!
