8 Things You Should Know Before Purchasing a Hotel Channel Manager

If you are doing research on hotel channel managers, then either you are purchasing it for the first time or are unsatisfied with your current channel manager and looking for a better solution. Here are some tips to keep in mind before making sure you are investing behind the right product and company and not wasting your time, resources and more importantly revenue. 


1. Response Speed & Quality

Every channel manager says it is the best and there is high competition with every one beating each other down on pricing. However, the products that have the best review ratings from real users and a good response rate to your pre-sales Q&A as well as onboarding requirements should be good bets for you to consider seriously. Because hotel tech integrations are complex, you will always have situations where a rate plan needs to be mapped or a new OTA needs to be integrated, or a feature you need requires explanation. Go with a product where you can expect a quick turnaround and response quality.

2. Training & Retraining Resources

Getting used to any new product or system takes time. But if you are left to figure your way around after having paid for a product, then it is money down the drain. Try to go with products who have invested in good product demos, online webinars, video tutorials and libraries and have an account manager ready to answer your initial teething issues as much as possible.

3. Guest Voucher Module

Most channel managers stop at just sending rates and inventories to OTA extranets to and fro. However as a hotelier you need to know the details of each booking that has happened along with the guest specifications, contact details, phone numbers, payment status and much more. Invest in a product that sends you a proper guest voucher for each booking in a consistent format simplified and unified to cater to all OTAs so that it is easy for you  to handle it at the hotel.

4. Room Allocation Interface

Most channel managers stop at just showing you a list of bookings that have been made for a date in the form of a list. But as a hotel / homestay owner you know that life is more difficult than that. You need to assign each booking a room and that alone is an extremely complex task. Therefore look for the product which also comes with a proper guest room allocation chart or a user interface which not only helps you keep OTAs in sync but also helps you properly handle and manage all incoming bookings and their room allocation properly to avoid on ground issues.

5. Official integrations and not screen scraping

A lot of channel managers rely on screen scraping for managing rates and inventories on various extranets. This is risky for their clients and leads to sync failure, only a one-way sync and a lot of overselling and underselling situations. You should try to ask your market manager at some important OTAs if the channel manager you are considering has an offial API / XML integration, whether it is a reliable one or not and what has been their experience with tech integration quality and number of failures in the past. Try to find out as much as you can about the stability of the product as much as possible.

6. Coverage of relevant OTAs

Try to go for a channel manager which has an official API integration with all important OTAs in your market or geography. Covering all OTAs in each market through an official API integration is not possible many times but if you are covered for 95% of your online booking sources in terms of historical revenue then that is a healthy number.

7. Analytics and Reports

Channel Managers can be a great source of information for you which can help you plan the next year if you are consistently tracking your history. Look for a channel manager which is tracking your revenue mix across OTAs, weekend and weekday wise booking trends, prebooking or pickup trends across channels and across time, occupancy charts , average room rate and more such metrics. The ability to have all your historical data easily represented in front of you on a report will help you anticipate future business across months and peak periods and plan pricing strategies way in advance to be able to maximize your revenues.

8. Last but not the least Mobile App

In this day and age it is extremely important to be agile and constantly moving even as business owners. Therefore you need a product which has the ability to manage your channels even from a mobile device while you are on the move. Try to look for a demo of the mobile app and look at its reviews and downloads and functionality before making a purchase decision.

Comments

  1. Aviana Williams15 September 2022 at 03:23

    RMS Cloud provides Hotel Channel Manager Software for hoteliers to manage all their reservations and channels in one place. RMS Cloud is a cloud-based system that helps hoteliers manage all their reservations and channels in one place. It’s a powerful tool that can help you find the best rates, automatically update your inventory, offer personalized service to guests, and so much more.

    ReplyDelete

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