Hoteliers list their services over various distribution channels to maximize their profit outcomes. They intend to get more direct and third-party bookings at ease. But how can a cloud based channel manager help in this?
It helps in keeping up with your brand’s recognition over all the online travel agencies (OTAs). The channel manager works upon updating the availability of rooms in real-time over the direct and in-direct platforms.
It enables you to connect your hotel business to the distribution channels. Moreover, it not just synchronizes the availability of rooms but all other necessary details across those channels.
The cloud based channel manager is accountable as one of the most cost-efficient ways to assist your hotel business operations. This technology makes it easy to advertise your property and services to all distribution platforms from a central dashboard.
To help you get a better catch at this, here are some evident tips and tricks to benefit your cloud based channel manager the most.
What Is a Cloud Based Channel Manager?
As a hotelier, it is important for you to list your business over various OTAs. And it becomes a daunting task for you to keep them organized at once.
With the use of a hotel distribution channel manager, it will become easy for you to track them, update your listings, and manage them all at once.
The perks of the cloud allow you to access the channel manager at any time and place. You will have no more rate parity issues over different channels, as the room rates will be updated the same for all channels with just one click.
Here are some of the major tasks carried out by the channel managers:
- Allotment: It is one of the most sophisticated strategies of channel management. It is based upon your business listing over various channels, where the tool offers dynamic allocation of inventory as per your specified objectives at the moment.
- Property Management System (PMS) Update: The channel manager becomes the communication medium between the PMS and booking websites. Every booking is updated onto the PMS through the channel manager without requiring manual supervision. Hence, this supervision saves a lot of your time and effort.
- Channel Mapping; The channel manager will map all room types to the formatting requirements of each distribution channel. It is important to make sure that the rooms are displayed consistently over the channels and remain in sync with PMS.
In short, a cloud based channel manager is important to ensure higher return on investment (ROI), optimal distribution, better market reach, and cost-effectiveness. So, before you know the tips for perfectly utilizing the OTA channel manager, it is important for you to know about it in depth.
5 Crucial Tips and Tricks to Master the Use of Cloud Based Channel Manager
Check out the below tips and tricks to make some changes to your current utilization of channel manager or start well with it. It will eventually maximize your profitability margin from the hotel business.
1. Channel Manager Should Support Direct Bookings
Even though you have your rooms and services available over various OTAs, direct bookings will always be of more profit than third-party bookings.
Therefore, it is important that you count on your website as a distribution channel as well. So, it is important that you pick the right booking engine for direct bookings and link it with your cloud based channel manager.
2. Use Pricing Tool for Setting up the Prices over Channel Manager
You will be using the channel manager to set up your price chart for different rooms. But remember that the rates should be competitive and must be decided after proper competitor analysis.
If you are underselling your rooms, the revenue margin will drop and overselling will suppress the count of bookings. Therefore, make sure to use some intelligence tool to predict the appropriate rates for your rooms.
In this way, you will be able to change the rates over channel manager with one click, as per the suggestions of the pricing tool.
Apart from that, the pricing tool will also suggest the peak and down months for your hotel business. Based on that, you can modify the rates to draw the attention of travelers.
3. Add a Global Distribution System as a Channel
In order to maximize the bookings and revenue, you need to be sure of the fact that your hotel is being found over all networks.
Therefore, you can consider adding a global distribution system (GDS) to the distribution channels and link it with the channel manager. Thus, this will give a large global exposure to your hotel.
The travel agents will have better access to more of your hotel and room information, based upon which they will draw more bookings for you.
4. Connect the Channel Manager to Property Management System
Prefer to integrate cloud based channel manager with Property management system for seamless hotel management.
By connecting your channel manager to the PMS, you will be able to automatically list all your booking channels and rooms at the same time.
The two-way communication between the channel manager and PMS upon integration will help reduce the headaches of overbookings for your hotel.
Apart from that, the hotel management team will not have to access every OTA separately for processing or updating reservations. You can do it from your PMS linked with the channel manager. Moreover, any booking that gets canceled will immediately be updated over the channels as ‘Available’.
5. Use the Cloud Based Channel Manager for Marking Important Events
The use of a cloud based channel manager allows you to mark some important dates within your PMS. It will alert everyone who uses the system about whether the room rates need to be hiked or dropped.
A pricing tool will be helpful for you to check the demand and supply on those dates. Based on that, your management team can modify the rates.
Get Along with AxisRooms’ Cloud Based Channel Manager
AxisRooms offers its hotelier clients the best-in-class and updated channel manager with powerful features and services.
Our channel manager is well-integrated with major travel partners on global measures. We offer you over 50 OTA integrations. So, it means that it will be pretty easy for you to manage all of your channel listings over the software.
In 2021, our channel manager was awarded as the most Affordable Software by SoftwareSuggest. We have also bagged many more awards for our highly proficient channel manager software and its powerful perks for hotel businesses to thrive.
Our cloud based channel manager supports almost all currencies over the portal. Which means you don’t have to worry about managing your bookings from international guests.
Go ahead and check out our website and request a demo for our channel manager. Upon satisfaction, you can go ahead and integrate it with your PMS and enable seamless optimization for your business.
