Travel gurus expect that by 2023 approximately 700 million people will be making their hotel bookings online. Newer technology and greater accessibility are making online bookings the go-to method for hotel reservations.
From a hotelier’s point of view- the availability of numerous online travel agents (OTAs) makes hotel distribution management confusing. Investing in a good channel manager for hotels not only streamlines the booking process but also makes it error-free.
But before we talk about the various benefits of integrating a channel manager with your hotel management system, let’s start with the ‘what and why’
What is a Hotel Channel Manager Software?
In 2018 alone, 82% of travel bookings were made online without any human interaction. There are numerous travel agents like Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Go-MMT, available to help guests make reservations across the world. If you are promoting your hotel on various platforms including OTAs, hotel websites, direct walk-ins, telephonic reservations, and email bookings- the task of constantly updating your inventory can be a nightmare.
A channel manager is a must-have tool for hoteliers. It helps with real-time hotel distribution management and pricing across various OTAs.
Why Do You Need A Hotel Channel Manager System In Place?
Without an efficient system in place to manage room availability and organize distribution across OTAs, hoteliers would miss booking opportunities on online booking sites. With a versatile hotel channel manager system, property owners avoid the risk of losing business, overbooking, or double booking rooms.
Apart from the above reasons, let’s look at a comprehensive list of why you need a hotel channel manager system:
- Generate more revenue: A good channel manager for hotels allows you to analyze data across all your distribution channels. You can use this information to understand which platforms are better for you and what your reservation trends look like. This information can then be applied to make intelligent strategies to improve hotel business.
- Book more rooms: Google trends show a 519% increase in travel bookings with the phrases “tonight” and “today”. A channel manager for hotels is your best bet to take advantage of this new booking habit. Connect to more OTAs and boost your bookings.
- Avoid overbookings: Manually promoting rooms across various channels has the associated risk of overbooking/double booking rooms. Leverage technology to make the best of hotel distribution management and promote your inventory to meet its full occupancy minus the risks. Automatize updates in real-time ensuring that guests only book the rooms that are available.
- Control everything from one place: A centralized dashboard that helps manage hotel distribution across multiple booking sources opens your hotel up to many more opportunities. With the right analytics in place, you can also strategically assign rooms to individual channels. This simple action would prevent losing out on customers on one channel, while another one is completely booked.
- Increase Profits: Use the centralized dashboard to automatically update room rates and pricing across platforms. Hotels need to be flexible and keep pace with the market trends, however, at the same time, avoid undesirable pricing and undercut prices.
- Save time in the back-office: Manual processes can be unreliable, time-consuming, and expensive. Automate the process of updating your inventory across multiple OTAs and your hotel front desk instantly. Save on man-hours and delete errors that may occur due to manually updating reservations across multiple platforms.
- Avoid rate differences: It would not be profitable for your hotel if you’re selling rooms with a high difference in rate across different channels. Sell rooms at the right price across all distribution channels.
- Upsell extra to create more sales: A channel manager for hotels also helps you reach new customers. A two-way unrestricted integration with hundreds of booking channels gives you the opportunity to reach new audiences across the globe. You can also create personalized add-ons and packages to improve the guest experience. OTAs also feel more compelled to list you on their website, as a channel manager system will ensure accurate data across all platforms.
- Improve direct web bookings: This may seem like a strange benefit of promoting your business on OTAs but it improves direct bookings. Most guests will look up your hotel on OTAs but will prefer to directly book from your hotel’s website. It is therefore important to have a versatile web booking engine, in addition to a great channel manager. AxisRooms has been awarded the Premier Status for 2021 Connectivity Partner with Booking.com for 5 years in a row.
- Increase reservations: Online travel bookings make up 27% of total online spending, amounting to a whopping $7.5 billion. Reservations made on OTAs can be managed in real-time, ensuring that there’s no discrepancy in the availability of rooms on various channels.
How Does a Channel Manager Software Improve Hotel Business?
The main purpose of a channel manager for hotels is to update hotel inventory and automatize distribution management. The advantages of investing in a good channel manager are multi-fold and can affect your hotel’s revenue, occupancy and help plan business long-term.
Let’s look at a few benefits of integrating your hotel property management system with versatile hotel channel manager software:
- Reduced burden on staff manually handling hotel distribution management.
- No human intervention in updating room availability avoiding overbooking.
- Automatic real-time updates on a centralized dashboard eliminating manual errors.
- Increased brand awareness and visibility on various platforms globally.
- Powerful two-way integration with your hotel property management system.
What is the AxisRooms Advantage?
AxisRooms’ hotel channel manager software goes above and beyond to offer user-friendly, accessible, and affordable hotel technology to hotels across the world. In addition to the features and benefits mentioned above, the AxisRooms’ channel manager offers the following unique advantages:
- Centralized dashboard to view a quick summary of reservations and revenue for the day.
- Automate the best available rate (BAR) and alleviate pricing nightmares.
- Create attractive promotions from the channel manager and sync them with OTAs.
- Cap allocations for OTAs based on data-driven analytics.
- Block OTAs or connect to new OTAs from a single dashboard.
- Get booking notifications in real-time and export this data into a report.
- Apply various analytics to help you make smarter booking and pricing decisions.
- Promote transparency by tracking all changes with pricing and inventory.
- In addition to over 50 popular OTAs, AxisRooms also provides Airbnb integration.
AxisRooms was awarded Asia’s leading Hotel Booking Solution Provider by World Travel Awards. Having received this recognition 4 years in a row, we are committed to offering you the best experience and support to boost your business.