What is an extranet? Booking.com, Expedia, Check24 and others explained for your B&B

Short answer: an extranet is the management portal a booking platform gives its accommodation partners. You use it to set rates, availability, photos and policies, and to see your bookings, guest messages, payouts and commission invoices. At Booking.com it is simply called the Extranet (admin.booking.com); at Expedia it is Expedia Partner Central. Airbnb has no classic extranet: you manage everything in your hosting dashboard on the website or in the app. Check24, HRS, eDreams, HotelTonight and most other channels also have their own partner portal.

Looking for the login to one of those extranets? You always find it with the platform itself, through the partner or host page on their own website. BedFlow PMS is not a way into those portals. What BedFlow PMS does do is explained at the end: making sure you don't have to work in ten extranets at once.

What do you do in an extranet?

Whatever it looks like, every extranet is used for roughly the same jobs:

• Rates and availability: which room is free on which date, at what price, with what minimum stay.
• Your listing: photos, description, amenities, room types and house rules.
• Policies: cancellation policy, payment method, check-in and check-out times, children and pets.
• Bookings: new reservations, changes and cancellations, with the details the platform shares with you.
• Guest messages: questions before and after the booking.
• Money: payouts, virtual credit cards and the commission invoice the platform sends you.
• Reviews and promotions: replying to reviews, joining discount campaigns and programmes.

The best-known extranets at a glance

• Booking.com — the Extranet at admin.booking.com, plus the Pulse app on your phone. For most B&Bs in the Benelux, the extranet they log into most often.
• Expedia — Expedia Partner Central. Your listing on Hotels.com, part of the same group, runs through it as well.
• Airbnb — no extranet in the classic sense. Calendar, prices, messages and payouts live in your hosting dashboard.
• Check24 and HRS — two German booking platforms, worth a look if you get many German guests or business travellers. Each has its own hotel portal.
• eDreams, HotelTonight, Hopper and Despegar — travel platforms that (also) sell overnight stays, each with its own partner environment.
• Bed banks such as Hotelbeds and HyperGuest — they resell your rooms to travel agents and other sites. How that works is explained in what is a bed bank?

The pattern is always the same: a different logo, a different layout, but the same questions. What does the room cost, is it free, and who is coming to stay?

The real problem: one extranet per channel

If you're on one platform, one extranet is fine. It gets awkward once you have more. With five channels you have five logins, you change a price five times, and after every booking you have to close that room on the other four platforms. Forget one and you have a double booking. Do it late at night and sooner or later you will forget one.

That's why hosts with more than one channel almost always use a channel manager: software that talks to the extranets instead of you. A booking on Booking.com automatically closes that room on Expedia, Airbnb and your own site, and a price change goes to every channel in one go. What a channel manager is exactly is explained in what is a channel manager?

Extranet and channel manager: who does what?

Once a channel manager is connected, your extranet turns from a workplace into a settings page. A practical split:

Through your PMS or channel manager:

• rates, availability and minimum stay;
• bookings, changes and cancellations;
• (with most connections) guest messages.

Still in the extranet itself:

• your listing's photos, description and amenities;
• your cancellation policy and house rules as the platform shows them;
• payouts and the commission invoice;
• replying to reviews and joining promotions.

If you still change a rate or availability in the extranet while the connection is active, the next sync may simply overwrite that change. So change it in one place. How to handle that at Booking.com is covered in changing prices: in the extranet or in your PMS? And how to connect a channel manager in your Booking.com extranet is explained in connecting a channel manager in the Booking.com extranet.

Do you need to be on all those platforms?

No. Every extra channel brings new guests, but also extra commission, another listing to maintain and another place where something can go wrong. For a small B&B, two or three well-kept channels plus your own booking engine often beat ten half-finished ones. A calm look at the trade-off is in how many booking sites should your B&B be on?

How BedFlow PMS solves this

BedFlow PMS connects through Channex to dozens of booking channels, including Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, Check24 and HRS. You set rates and availability once in BedFlow PMS; every booking lands in the same calendar and closes the room on the other channels straight away. Guest messages from Booking.com and Airbnb arrive in one inbox. You then only open the extranet for your listing, your invoices and your reviews.

The full list of channels is in the manual under all integrations, the prices on /pricing.

Less time in extranets? Try BedFlow PMS free for 30 days, no credit card required.