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To increase online bookings through your own website depends on achieving a high position in search results. Getting your hotel online using channel manager software is a really convenient way to manage distribution and get your property in front of potential guests quickly. Most established hotel channel managers offer a similar feature set. In days gone by, the pooled inventory model, where all distribution channels received the same room availability, replaced fixed allocations where accommodation providers previously struggled to avoid double bookings when manually updating. Selling rooms at the same consistent price across all online travel agents (known as rate parity) was also a requirement.
But these days an independent hotelier using a hotel channel manager might want to manage availability and pricing more proactively, by holding back some rooms of a given type from being sold through third parties for direct booking. Similarly, you might want to sell your hotel rates at different price points across the different connected channels you are working with. Let's face it, no one wants to have the burden of creating and managing more rates just for their online sales channels. If only you could just apply a fixed fee or variable price modifier to the regular rates offered to the public as part of your distribution strategy...
And what about using yield management to apply a change to each room types pricing on the fly, based on rules you create around the number of free rooms remaining and the booking lead time? Many third party channel managers focus on the number of sales channels they link with, without offering advanced time saving functionality like this.
This can all be easily achieved in the Caterbook channel manager, which is a core module integrated within our property management system.
Our channel manager updates booking.com & Expedia with two way integration in real time, downloading reservations straight to the calendar, allocating bookings to available rooms automatically. Both guest's own and virtual payment cards from the Online Travel Agent are tokenised and stored at no additional charge using our payment gateway.
Tourism Exchange extends our channel management through additional Online Travel Agencies like Agoda, CTrip, AirBnB, Trivago, TripAdvisor instant bookings. For many properties in the UK, local and regional Destination Management Organisations (DMO's) charging lower commissions than OTA's are also served by TXGB.
The Global Distribution System or GDS powers bookings through over 600,000 business and leisure travel agents the world over.
Caterbook hotel pms integrates with the Global Distribution System providing an important alternative distribution source for modern hotels seeking to their maximize revenues throughout the year.
Google is shaking up travel, much as it has with other areas of online business. The new free Google hotel ads show your real-time pricing and availability on the google search results page under your My Business listing, with the reservation completing on your own website's booking engine meaning more reservations landing in the property management system, all commission free and an important part of an independent hotel's digital marketing.
Updating rates and availability across all your online distribution channels in real time is a key requirement of good channel manager software. The Caterbook channel manager includes our own native connections to booking.com and Expedia, as well as additional hotel distribution through Tourism Exchange GB (TXGB). We are close to piloting an integration with a GDS gateway, meaning your room availability and pricing could be listed for sale through both high street and business travel agents. Our development team are close to completing the work required to add distribution through the Google Hotel Free Booking Links platform.
Any direct bookings taken on your website booking engine or manually entered in the hotel PMS automatically update room inventory and price adjustments to the booking channels, meaning that you can manage your hotel bookings all in one place, without jumping between different systems. For hotel owners, managers and reception staff involved in day to day hotel management tasks the Caterbook channel manager module delivers results.
