In one Hotel Hell episode, lodge guests had to search for a front desk employee by themselves. Eventually, a bartender checked them in with a pen and notebook…The property owners didn’t have an online booking system and were losing a significant amount of revenue they could have used for development. This situation is more an exception than a rule. Businesses understand that the only way to attract modern, tech-savvy travelers is to focus on online sales across numerous travel markets, including their own websites. And that’s a lot of manual, time-consuming work for one person. How to make inventory distribution smooth and stress-free? With channel management software.
A channel manager is a software tool that enables achieving multichannel inventory distribution with instant updates of prices and availability. In other words, it allows you to simultaneously sell your inventory across several websites and provide customers with actual information on prices and a property occupancy.
A channel manager can be a stand-alone solution or part of a hotel’s property management system (PMS) or central reservation system (CRS).
So, there are 3 main reasons why property owners use channel managers: managing distribution, ensuring consistency across channels, and providing analytics.
