It should be noted that even a small hotel required the services of a channel manager. A small hotel can be considered a boutique hotel, motel, and Inn with 10 to 100 rooms. Imagine that constant monitoring and updating booking channels like Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, and others could be an unsustainable drain on cost and time to hoteliers. Consider how long it takes you to log into each third-party channel's dashboard and amend it manually.

Engaging a cloud-based channel manager to help you manage your properties is a key growth driver. It will help you to improve your hotel's efficiency, thus, resulting in more guests and more hotel revenues. There are a lot of channel manager providers in the market, thus it is critical to ensure that you have done enough research on which channel manager you should invest in for your small hotel.

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.

Are you looking to upgrade your existing hotel channel manager or subscribe to a channel manager for a new property? There are numerous channel managers on the market, and no single provider is ideal for all properties, so it is critical that you conduct your research before making a decision and ensure that you have invested in the right solution that aligns with your objective. In this blog, I will highlight the top 5 Channel Manager providers renowned by the industry and available globally as well as the criteria that you need to consider when choosing a hotel channel manager.

Hoteliers have to wear multiple hats to ensure that their operation is done effectively and efficiently. However, this often comes at a cost. It is important to mention that some of the daily operations and workload can be time-consuming and often cause delays. However, thanks to the smart hotel technology, it allows hoteliers to run their operation with cost-saving and bring more opportunities to increase revenue. One of the important tools to support your hotel operation smoothly and effectively is the Channel Manager.

There are three ways to keep your Airbnb calendar in sync with the Booking.com calendar. In this article, we will talk about the pros and cons of each. The vacation rental industry has become more popular, and it's now even more competitive. If you are the property owner or operator that wanted to grow your Airbnb business, you need to consider getting your property listed on more than one platform other than the Airbnb app. By advertising the property through multiple channels, there is a high possibility to reach more audiences around the world. It gives more opportunities to generate more bookings.

What is a Channel Manager?

A Channel Manager is a system that helps hotels in updating their real-time inventory distribution and rates across multiple channels hence managing the reservation accordingly. 

This means hoteliers that are using Hotel Channel Manager are not required to log in individually to each OTA dashboard, in order to update room availability as well as price rate and let the Channel Manager do its job. 

For hotel or BnB businesses, leveraging on the Online Travel Agents (OTAs) such as Agoda, Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, and many more to drive booking sales is common, especially in Southeast Asia region. Certainly, this does not come free. Based on the Agency Model, OTAs will charge the business a commission, ranging from 3% to 30%, for each confirmed booking.

Some might say that offering rate parity is one of the fairest ways of conducting rate strategies. So, what does rate parity actually means? 

Hotel rate parity is when the hotels are implementing the same rate across all distribution channels including their own hotel websites. It is a legal agreement between the hotels and Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) where they agree to offer the same rate on all platforms that they sell regardless of how much commission they have to pay to OTAs. Hotels are also not allowed to undercut the room prices that OTAs display on their platforms.

A channel manager helps you to continuously sell and manage your maximum inventory through various distribution channels and provides updated price and rooms allotment information.

Finding the right Channel Manager for your Hotel can be difficult, especially when there are so many options available online. Because we know that you’re not the only one facing these difficulties, we decided to help you by sharing the most important aspects you should look for when choosing your channel manager to help you make the best choice.

OTAs play an important role in the hotel industry and online booking nowadays. There are certain times where people love to make a booking through the OTAs channel. In addition, the research found that more than half of the bookings were made through OTA platforms. With this, hotels should not want to miss the opportunity by increasing their properties more visible online.

Did you know that you can distribute and sell your maximum room inventory to many OTAs without worrying about overbooking and disparity rate issues? Through a Channel Manager, hotels can monitor their real-time availability and rates across all OTAs, thus helping to adjust and update seamlessly across all the channels.

If you are looking for a Channel Manager for your hotel to make your job easier and at the same time want to increase the hotel's ROI, let's consider this Top 5 Popular Channel Manager in Malaysia: