Imagine you have many guests coming to book their stay with your hotel whereas you only have one front desk staff to entertain them. Guests are complaining as they are waiting for their turn. Then eventually, some of them walk out of your hotel and decide to stay at another hotel. Aren’t you losing your guests already?
Manually managing your room booking is time-consuming and less efficient. You may need to hire a lot of staff to handle those processes. If implementing with channel manager software, you can manage your room distribution smoothly and effectively. With that in mind, this article is all about helping hotel owners to run their hotel businesses better through channel manager software.
As mentioned earlier, it’s less effective for front desk staff to manually manage room distribution. This is especially true in the case of group bookings like an event, wedding, or corporate meetings. Your front desk staff must be really busy entertaining a huge number of guests.
Since your hotel didn’t have an online booking system to facilitate guests’ reservations, you’re not only losing them to your competitors but also way down in maximizing your revenue. Listen, hoteliers! Such a situation can be avoided if you’re updated with guests’ changing behavior. As a player in the hotel industry, you need to understand that the only way to attract tech-savvy guests is to follow their trends. Change your focus to online booking and sell your rooms across all channels, including your website and social media pages.
Advancement in technology and dependent on the Internet are two main players that determine the success of the evolving hotel industry. Tech-savvy travelers are around the globe. Gone are the days that room bookings are made when guests reach the hotel front office. With the emergence of OTAs like Agoda and Booking.com, bookings can easily be made earlier, saving time and of course, with more room options to choose from.
If you want to have a competitive advantage in the hotel industry, you need to acknowledge how software solutions like a Channel Manager can greatly impact your hotel business and most importantly, your room distributions.
A Channel Manager works in integration with your hotel’s PMS in managing your hotel rooms distribution across all channels simultaneously. It acts as a ‘middle software’ between your PMS and channels you sell your room on, managing real-time availability and guests’ data. They pull from a central pool of inventory that maps to existing rooms to provide real-time availability updates from/to the PMS. Each new reservation is delivered right into the PMS, without any manual intervention.
When a guest book a room on your website or any of your connected channels, the booking will be added to the hotel’s PMS. The Channel Manager automatically updates the hotel’s availability on all the connected channels and block the dates. In other words, your room listings will always be accurate and consistent, no matter how many channels you advertise on. You don’t have to manually add new bookings as you only need one calendar to manage your room bookings.
Photo courtesy from SiteMinder
The Reservation Department can easily retrieve information on every booking made from either the connected PMS or the Channel Manager’s Reservation Page. All payment and guest details are reflected on the Reservation Page. Room prices can also be seamlessly updated with Channel Manager software. In case that the hotel needs to have a different pricing policy for each OTA, it is possible to set various pricing rules for every single channel.
Softinn PMS and Softinn Extranet work with the world-leading Channel Manager, SiteMinder. Learn how Channel Manager works by watching this SiteMinder Demo Video:
Video courtesy from Youtube.
With a Channel Manager that works together with PMS, you’re able to manage guests’ bookings, your rooms’ real-time availability and prices, and your guests’ data simultaneously. A Channel Manager is, therefore, a key component of the room distribution strategy that your hotel shouldn’t ignore.
If you are currently on the hunt for the perfect Channel Manager for your hotel, then our Softinn PMS + Channel Manager integration is your best solution! Remember, the key to maximizing your hotel revenues is to have the right channels to distribute your rooms and most importantly to manage them correctly!