Hotel channel manager: what it must handle once you have more than a few rooms

Short answer: a hotel channel manager sells room types, not individual rooms. For each type it sends the number of free rooms, the price and the restrictions to Booking.com, Expedia and your other channels, and pulls their bookings in. Which room the guest actually gets is decided by your PMS. When choosing one, check seven things: inventory per room type, rates per type and per channel, restrictions per channel, speed on the last room, the channels hotels actually use, groups, and how well it works with your PMS.

What a channel manager is and how it works in general is covered in what is a channel manager. This article is about what changes once you no longer have five different rooms, but a hotel with ten, twenty or forty rooms, many of them alike.

1. Inventory per room type, not per room

A B&B often sells each room on its own: "the Garden Room", "the Attic Room". A hotel sells a type: "Standard Double", "Superior with balcony", "Suite". On Booking.com the guest doesn't see room 204, but "Standard Double Room, 3 left".

So your channel manager must count, per type, how many rooms are free that night, and update that number on every booking, cancellation or block. Ask:

• Can I put several physical rooms under one type, with the count following automatically?
• What happens if I block one room of a type for maintenance? Does the count drop by one, rather than the whole type closing?
• Can I sell a type smaller than it really is, for example holding back two of twenty rooms for direct guests?

2. Rates per type and per channel

In a hotel every room type has its own price, and that price moves with the season, weekends and events in town. On top of that comes a per-channel layer: if you pay 18% commission on Booking.com, you often want a higher price there than on your own website.

What matters is that you set those prices in one place and the channel manager converts them per channel. Keeping prices per channel by hand sooner or later leaves one channel cheaper than intended. How to pass commission on properly is explained in net revenue per booking channel.

3. Restrictions per channel

Hotels steer occupancy far more with restrictions than with price alone:

• Minimum stay: two nights on a busy Saturday, so Friday doesn't stay empty.
• Closed to arrival (CTA) or closed to departure (CTD) on certain days.
• Stop sell: temporarily closing a channel or a room type without closing your whole hotel.

The difference between a solid and a thin channel manager is often right here: can you set those restrictions per room type and per channel, and do they really reach the channel? A minimum stay that only applies on your own site doesn't help you on Booking.com.

4. Speed on the last room

An overbooking almost always happens on the last free room of a type: two guests book within minutes on two different channels. The faster the channel manager updates availability after a booking, the smaller that window.

Ask for an API connection (not iCal) with the major channels, and ask what happens when a channel briefly doesn't respond: does the system retry, and do you get an alert? More on that risk in preventing overbookings.

5. The channels hotels actually use

A holiday rental lives off Airbnb and Vrbo. A hotel has a different mix: Booking.com and Expedia (with Hotels.com) first, often Google Hotel Ads next, business channels such as HRS, regional channels such as Check24, short-break sites such as Weekendesk, and sometimes wholesalers (bed banks) such as Hotelbeds. So don't just check whether a channel manager has "hundreds of channels", but whether the ones you need work through a real connection.

6. Groups and blocks

A wedding, a seminar or a coach tour: hotels get requests for five or ten rooms at once. Those rooms must come off sale on every channel straight away, even if the names follow later. Check whether you can enter a group as one booking with several rooms, and whether those rooms then come off your inventory automatically. More in group bookings for several rooms.

7. Working with your PMS

The channel manager knows a "Standard Double" was booked. Your PMS decides which room that becomes, puts it on the cleaning list and creates the invoice. The better those two work together, the less you retype. If the channel manager sits inside your PMS, you have one calendar, one price list and one place for your restrictions. If you use a standalone channel manager, check that bookings, changes and cancellations reach your PMS without manual work. The trade-off between standalone and built-in is covered in choosing a channel manager: all-in-one or standalone.

Quick checklist

• Inventory per room type, with blocking per room
• Prices in one place, converted per channel
• Minimum stay, CTA, CTD and stop sell per type and per channel
• API connection with Booking.com and Expedia, with alerts on errors
• The hotel channels you need (Google, HRS, Check24, …)
• Groups as one booking with several rooms
• Bookings reach your PMS without retyping

How BedFlow PMS does it

In BedFlow PMS the channel manager is part of the PMS. You connect Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, Google, HRS, Check24, Weekendesk and other channels; availability, prices and restrictions go out, and bookings come in automatically. A room type with several rooms shows as one card with the number of free rooms on your own booking page, and BedFlow picks the room by your rule, for example floor by floor. Restrictions such as minimum stay, CTA, CTD and stop sell are set per room and per channel, or in one go for a period, several rooms and all channels. You set prices once, with a markup per channel for the commission. More in the guide to restrictions and the prices per plan.

Running a small hotel and curious how it works with your rooms and channels? Try BedFlow PMS free for 30 days at bedflow.eu.