Hotel Channel Manager

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.