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The Basics of a
Channel Manager:
A Guide for Independent Hoteliers
Contents
Costs to consider 12
the needle. 10
Rooms
10
Rooms
hotel will provide its best suppliers more
rooms, meaning the smaller players get
10 10
way less than the average 10.
Ultimately, a channel manager allows you to distribute the Rooms Rooms This means the hotel has to constantly
rooms that you have available across a variety of different monitor and shuffle its inventory, with
channels, providing you with an opportunity to reach a global
audience.
5
Rooms
5
Rooms
the real risk of missing bookings, as they
run out of inventory on the smaller – but
5 5
Without a channel manager, you’ll have to split your room still valuable – OTAs.
availability among different agents to ensure that you don’t Rooms Rooms
overbook your rooms on any given night. This can lead to
wasted inventory and lost profits.
1 0 1 0 RATES AND
AVAILABILITY
Rooms
1 0 Available
HOTEL
PMS/CRS
Rooms
1 0 Available
This ensures that you will connect to as many sites as possible without ever worrying about
overselling your rooms. Making sure international travellers can easily book with you is a top priority
for independent hotels. Your channel manager should help you do this by allowing you to partner
with a variety of OTAs that can allow you to reach markets you could never access directly.
For example, to sell your rooms to Chinese travellers, you should connect with Ctrip, because it is
the preferred booking site in China. The more sites a channel manager connects you to, the better.
Using a true pooled inventory model, SiteMinder’s Channel Manager helps tens of thousands of
hotels worldwide increase their online exposure to convert prospective guests into paid bookings.
Providing two-way XML connections to more than 350 of the world’s leading booking channels from
one central cloud application, SiteMinder’s Channel Manager provides properties of any size a way
to maximise exposure, increase revenue, and reduce overall costs.
1 0 1 0
so there is only one view of inventory and The Channel Manager RESERVATIONS
A good channel manager will allow you to easily track and measure which online sales
Solid reporting on channels are working. This gives you the knowledge you need to negotiate commissions and
end partnerships that aren’t working for you.
which channels work Your channel manager will run seamless connectivity using pooled inventory delivered
to some of the world’s biggest online travel agents and third party booking sites. Here at
It goes without saying that in order to SiteMinder we have more than 350 available to our hotel customers all over the world.
manage your revenue successfully, you must We know it’s unlikely you’ll connect to all 350 at your hotel, but let’s say you connect to 10%
of those available. That’s still 35 channels to analyse and report on – a big job for any busy
be able to see all your revenue streams hotelier.
– from the online booking websites where By choosing a channel manager with comprehensive built-in reports, you’ll gain faster and
you advertise your property, to your more effective insights into how your inventory is performing across all 35 distribution
channels so you can chop and change as it’s needed. It’s critical to compare and understand
marketing and sales efforts. how successful each channel is in terms of revenue – especially when you want to try
connecting with a new channel for your market.
Here is
an example
from SiteMinder’s
Channel Manager You should use your
showcasing channel channel manager to look at:
effectiveness • Your channel yield
over time:
• Earnings from reservations
• Booking volume and average lead time
In this case, all inventory is automatically reduced across all booking sites when a booking is
Pooled inventory made on any site. SiteMinder’s Channel Manager works in real time so if there’s one room left
on Booking.com and one room left on Expedia, and one of those sells, it’ll be updated on all
SiteMinder’s Channel Manager uses a sites immediately.
pooled inventory distribution model. Crucially by using the pooled inventory model, SiteMinder allows hoteliers to sell their stressed
inventory - the very last remaining rooms - helping maximise revenue. You can read more
But what does that mean and why is it about this model on our blog. With pooled inventory, you can provide all your OTAs with all of
beneficial? Pooled inventory means that your inventory at once, so you never miss a booking.
you evenly distribute all your available Secondly, and more importantly, by giving all of the OTAs all of your inventory at once – which is
what pooled inventory supports – most of the OTAs will reward you with better visibility in their
rooms across a number of sites – including ranking algorithm. No one knows for sure what the actual algorithms are and they do change
your own website. from OTA to OTA, but generally OTAs are keen to provide priority if they have more rooms to
sell its simple business logic.
Licensing cost
A flat monthly fee is better for budgeting purposes, and will allow you to
reinvest most of your revenue back into the property as you grow (instead
of taking a significant chunk of it).
Find out if you will be charged for initial setup and training. Some will also
charge you per additional user that you add to your account (for example,
if you want to give your new receptionist access to it).
Feature
Yes - two-way XML connections
Does it offer two-way
are available to 350+ of the world’s leading booking
channel connections?
channels.
Does it deliver
Yes - The Channel Manager reports on channel
comprehensive
yield, earnings from reservations, booking volume,
reporting to measure
and average lead time.
success?
Get booked Remove manual entry with complete Have all your rooms online Make more powerful,
faster online real-time automation at once to increase revenue insightful decisions
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