Table of Contents
The hotel industry largely depends on the OTAs and GDSs to distribute the existing stock of hotel rooms in a given market. Lack of dynamic channel management strategy contributes to channel management problems such as loss of control of pricing, inventory, and profitability. This is why the concept of channel managers comes into the picture. The best free channel manager can help hotels effectively manage their distribution across multiple platforms.
It should be noted that channel managers serve the role of mediators between PMS and sales channels used by the particular hotel. The channel manager receives information about available rooms and rates from the property system and then disseminates this to other potential sources of room bookings including OTAs, GDS among others.
1. Empowers the distribution of products to more sales points
Distribution is one of the important areas where hotels have to invest more so as to be able to achieve higher occupancy and revenues. Today, and for the past few years, travel buyers go online and search for hotels directly or use OTAs . The absence of a hotel on such external sites is a loss of an opportunity to market the place to possible clients.
Nevertheless, controlling the content and low rates at dozens of OTAs and metasearch sites becomes a tremendous and time-consuming task. This is something that channel managers help hotels avoid by managing inventory and rates for distribution on outside platforms. New rates and availability are then passed to all the connected channels making the hotel’s distribution network grow with little effort from the channel manager.
Channel managers also connect with OTAs and metasearch engines, along with Global Distribution Systems , which travel agents use to book flights, hotels and car rentals. This means that the GDS distribution expands corporate and meetings business opportunities for hotels. The automated integration can enable even independent hotels and small chains to serve this market segment for a fraction of the cost of having direct GDS connectivity.
2. Enabling Rate Flexibility on Locations & Distribution Channels
This is because rates and availability change constantly depending on the demand and manually inputting the updated information on one hand into various connected systems with the other is tiresome. This is achieved in channel managers through an automatic rate distribution which means that rate changes from the property management system are real-time distributed to the other systems. This dynamic pricing and availability in real time guarantee that the hotel always controls the status of room rates and availability to customers through the different points of sale channels including online travel agencies and the brand website.
It also allows for a detailed level of control for the rates to be loaded into the particular sales channels. OTA’s can also negotiate with hotels to make special discounted rates, or exclusive packages during promotional activities while keeping the rates the same on other OTA’s. Different from the public leisure rates, the corporate rates and availability can be set up in channel managers allowing for specific contracts with GDS and travel agency channels.
3. Offers Guidance with Channel Performance Statistics
When bookings are distributed over multiple sales channels, it is virtually impossible to know which channel provides the hotel with the most valuable guests. Channel managers have overcome this blind spot by ensuring that the productivity of the channel is recorded in detail. Having access to powerful analytics grants insights about channel performance by delivering figures including bookings by segment, ADR and revenue by channel.
The activity breakdown of OTA performance helps to determine which of them provides more booking volume or commission expenses. The findings show that channel contribution via GDS versus commissions paid to travel agents can help with better channel decisions.
4. Eliminating the Monotone Part of Managing
Inventory and rates distribution requires time and efforts to monitor, as well as addressing the issues with demand data. Sometimes, rates have to be changed across all the channels of sales, and inventories have to be balanced at the same time, and probably all within a very short period of time, say within the same fiscal year. This is often especially cumbersome where there are limited staff resources as some activities like the above mentioned repetitive tasks can easily overwork any limited staff. This is achieved through rate loading, restrictions pushing, inventory updates, extranet data transfers and parity monitoring that channel managers prevent from burdening the user.
Thus, centralized cloud access eliminates the need to log in to several extranet sites and instead is a single control center for OTAs, GDS, and website sales channels. Conventional methods of mass rate file upload ensure that pricing structures for all future dates are also set, which keeps the rate calendars of all the channels consistent. Many rules engines also deliver new and updated rates and rate card length of stay restrictions. The daily availability counts and allotments ensure that the room inventory is consistent over the integrated channels.
5. Aims at Achieving Brand Stability and Ownership
It is here that, when 3rd party sites are used to display inventory and beyond the control of the hotel, brand standards suffer the hurdles and reputational risk from wrong and outdated information. OTA and metasearch results should be truthful about hotel offerings while using visual contents that are consistent with the brand. They provide hoteliers with the opportunity to exercise once more control over their brand on external channels through content distribution centralization.
Instead, channel managers only transfer approved information such as room descriptions, photographs, and details of available amenities to OTA sites. Flexible rates and limiteds eliminate cases of wrong pegging or excessive room occupation. Having hotel specific extranet logins instead of OTA access codes means that the hotel controls all property information and can change it to fit its needs.
Conclusion
The intricacies of current hotel distribution systems mean that the strategic use of best-of-breed technology solutions is critical. As the chief organizers behind integrated channel distribution that form the system’s backbone, channel managers ensure order. A robust hotel management system, working in conjunction with channel managers, can further enhance a property’s operational efficiency and distribution strategy.
