First, let’s quickly talk about three other terms that play into this conversation: Property Management System (PMS), OTA (Online Travel Agency) and extranet. I describe a PMS as the computer that sits at the front desk of a lodging property that keeps track of arrivals, departures and which rooms are occupied. OTAs are simply websites that resell hotel rooms like expedia.com, booking.com and ReserveDirect.com. Lastly, extranet is the online portal that OTAs let you use to manage your room rates and inventory for their sites. Some people will be more familiar with a terms like dashboard or back-office.
If you use OTAs as part of your strategy to sell your property’s rooms, then you’ll need to regularly login to each extranet and update inventory and rates for each day of the year UNLESS you use a channel manager. A channel manager plays the middle man between your PMS and the OTAs. Communication from the hotel to the OTAs ends up looking like this: PMS>Channel Manager>OTA. Why add a middle man? The Channel Manager will hold all of your inventory and rates and make sure that your PMS and all the OTAs have the same number of each room type (which will keep you from overselling) and will keep your rates in parity, or equal, everywhere on the internet (which makes the OTAs happy and increases your ranking).
Short story: if you use OTAs (and you should as part of your strategy), then using a channel manager will save you the man hours you’re spending on logging in to each extranet and managing rates and inventory. It will also keep your rooms on the shelf to be bought continually, and will help eliminate the constant human manipulation which creates lots of opportunities for mistakes.
When do you NOT need a Channel Manager? If you use OTAs like the three mentioned earlier, then there is a way around using a Channel Manager that still allows your PMS to communicate with them automatically to help keep you moving rooms accurately. Contact me at Ask@BransonMan.com and I’ll show you how this works. Thanks for your time!