Hotel Channel Management During the Rise of Revenge Travel and Tourism

Recently, the world went through a phase, a phenomenon called revenge travel. It is a concept developed in the wake of Covid-19, where people escaped their day-to-day life, from the frets and closed spaces of cities, to touristy places.

With the decline of Covid second wave, thousands of tourists ditched their mundane lives and flocked to the mountains. For instance, in India, many pictures and videos of travellers crowding the hill stations of Shimla, Mussoorie, and Manali surfaced on the Internet.

Not being able to book rooms hassle-free became the talk of many towns. A hotelier’s topmost priority is to ensure supreme hospitality for their guests. This took a backseat when revenge travel rose in here.

But this is no reason to compromise with the excellent service that is expected of you, not only by the industry but also your customers. Tools like Hotel Channel Manager are your saviour to run your business smoothly with minimum fuss.

In this blog, we’re going to talk about what a Channel Manager is and how you can provide your guests with wonderful, stress-free stays with the use of it.

What Is a Channel Manager?

With an upswing in the revenge travel trend, travellers are choosing to make online reservations for rooms. Therefore, hoteliers must upgrade their mode of work from manual to digital.

This is where a channel manager software swoops in and becomes your knight in shining armour. A Channel Manager is an amazing tool that helps you update your room availability and their rates to various Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)

A hotel channel manager functions from a nexus, cancelling the need to manually update room bookings and rates. It also helps control overbooking of rooms as it keeps track of all your listings on all OTAs simultaneously. You can also use it to manage your hotel website.

Now, let’s get to understanding the concept of the channel management system.

What Is a Channel Management System?

Channel management system in the hotel industry means managing the distribution of your hotel on online channels to sell your hotel inventory to various booking websites anywhere in the world. They include agents like Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), retail travel agents, Meta Search Engines and Global Distribution Systems (GDs).

Importance of Channel Management in the Hotel Industry During the Rise of Revenge Vacations

A channel manager has a lot to offer, along with updating room rates and their availability. It also helps you manage and increase your bookings and grow your revenue.

With the decline in offline, walk-in, and telephonic bookings, a channel manager is your best option to place your bets on. It helps you connect with online channels, where more tourists are booking their holidays.

It eliminates the risk of overbooking as well as double bookings and thus saves your time. This is possible because a channel manager provides live rates and availability across all your channels simultaneously. It also ensures you always have optimised rates and the channels you are using are helping you flourish your business.

A channel manager not only helps you become more productive but also eliminates manual data entry, which could be tedious and frustrating. It also enables complete transparency of data across all channels. This gives you clarity to understand if everything is in the right direction or not.

Travellers appreciate fluidity in the cancellation policy. Considering the pandemic and the rise of revenge tourism, travel plans can become uncertain because of changing travel restrictions. A good channel manager helps provide a flexible cancellation policy. This doesn’t mean that the hotel loses bookings. Rather, this feature helps free up room availability and get more bookings for hotels.

Also, guest satisfaction is of utmost importance in the hotel industry. By integrating the hotel’s property management system (PMS), a great channel manager can make everything trouble-free for the hotel staff, especially the front desk staff, to manage hotel operations and aid customers appropriately.

Keeping in view the above aspects, choosing the right channel manager software for your hotel is essential. But how do we do that?

How to Choose a Suitable Channel Management Software for Hotels?

Channel managers are valuable partners to team up with. By allocating your inventory to many channels, they help maintain visibility and increase your chances of bookings, resulting in higher profits.

The following are some pointers to consider while choosing the best hotel channel manager:

Keep an account of the number of channels that are connected with your channel manager.

Make sure if the channels that are connected with your channel manager will benefit you or not.

Analyse how many channels, room types per channel, and days your channel manager can manage concurrently.

Estimate how far your channel manager can handle availability.

Find out if your channel manager will show you which channels would deliver the most bookings and which would provide the most revenue.

Once you’ve made sure of these factors, choosing the right channel manager will become uncomplicated.

Time to Cater to Those Revenge Travellers

As a hotelier, you need to be prepared for revenge travel and be aware of the other components that might arise at any moment.

Understand your guests. These are difficult times for everyone, so personalise their stay and make them more comfortable. This is your chance to show your best hospitality and improve your brand’s status.

Ensure double vaccination of your staff because safety always comes first. Strive for contactless services as much as possible.

Your hotel’s hygiene standards must comply with Covid-19 protocols. Keep enough supply of masks and sanitisers for everyone.

Take care of these aspects that will draw travellers to your hotel by making their stay as stress-free and memorable as possible.

As Covid-19 travel regulations/restrictions keep changing, avail a flexible cancellation policy. Last but not least, design your revenge travel packages to be attractive and budget-friendly, and also sustainable. This is to ensure the revenge and rush of the travellers doesn’t disturb nature and life.

Important Note

AxisRooms channel manager administers rates, inventory & bookings across all online channels in real-time. AxisRooms’ online channel manager has connections with a wide network of travel partners, which guarantees your work to be smooth and trouble-free. To begin with, you can request their channel manager demo and take an informed decision for your hotel.