Guide

What is a hotel channel manager?

A channel manager is the piece of software that sits between your hotel and the booking sites. It pushes your rates and free rooms out to Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb and the rest, and pulls their reservations back into your calendar, so every channel sells the same rooms at the same price and no room is sold twice.

The problem it solves

Without one, a small hotel keeps its availability by hand: a booking arrives from Booking.com by email, someone closes the room on Expedia and on the website, and updates the calendar. It works until a busy Friday, when two sites sell the last room in the same hour. That is the double booking, and it costs a relocation, a bad review and an evening of phone calls.

Prices drift the same way. A season change typed on three sites by three people ends up as three prices, and the guest finds the lowest one.

What a channel manager actually does

• Availability out. When a room is booked anywhere, the other channels are told within seconds that one fewer room is free for those nights.
• Rates and restrictions out. Prices per room type and date, minimum stays, closed-to-arrival days: set once, published everywhere.
• Reservations in. A booking made on an OTA appears in your PMS calendar with the guest, the dates, the price and the channel, without anyone typing it.
• Changes and cancellations in. When the guest changes the dates or cancels on the OTA, your calendar changes with it and the room goes back on sale.

Separate tool or built into the PMS?

Most channel managers are a separate subscription, connected to the PMS by an integration. That is one more login, one more monthly fee, and one more place where a mapping can silently break: a room type renamed in the PMS, a rate plan the connection does not know, and the OTA keeps selling last month's price.

A PMS with the channel manager built in has one list of rooms and one set of rates, and the connection is set up once. Geptu connects through Channex, a channel manager used by hundreds of hotels, from inside the PMS: the same room types, the same calendar, with the OTA mapping shown next to the rooms it maps to.

What to check before you connect

1. Which channels, exactly. Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb cover most small hotels. Ask about the rest only if you use them.
2. Two-way, not one-way. Some cheap tools only send availability out. You want reservations, changes and cancellations coming in too.
3. How fast. Updates should reach the OTAs in seconds, not on an hourly schedule.
4. What happens when it breaks. You should be told, on the screen and on your phone, when a channel stops answering, before a guest tells you.
5. Who pays per channel. Some charge per connected OTA; some charge a percentage of OTA bookings. Read the price per month at your size.
6. The handover. Reservations already on the OTAs must be imported, and the old connection switched off the same day the new one goes on. Overlap is where double bookings happen.

Common questions