What is a Channel Manager for Hotels?
Hotel Channel Manager Software
Online booking portals such as booking.com, HRS, hotel.info etc are nowadays of great importance as sales channels for many accommodation businesses. These online booking channels can ensure significantly higher occupancy rates, as well as giving your business a greater web presence.
But as well as selling rooms, these distribution channels also need your time and attention: Individually maintaining rates and vacancies on multiple platforms can be very time-consuming, especially for smaller businesses. This is where a channel manager can help you!
Save Time & Reduce the Risk of Overbooking
In order to minimise this maintenance effort, Lodgit Desk offers a channel manager interface as an optional add-on module. This helps eliminate the annoying manual updating of vacancies and makes renewing of individual online sales channels unnecessary.
Incoming online bookings are transferred to Lodgit Desk quickly via this 2-way interface, which as well as saving your work, also significantly reduces the risk of overbooking. Work smarter: with just one click, all of your information can be updated!
Channel Manager connection to Lodgit Desk
Here we list some of the Channel Manager providers that connect easily with Lodgit Desk:
CultSwitch represents a comprehensive platform for distribution management, through which many online booking channels (such as HRS, booking.com, expedia, venere and many more), global distribution systems (such as amadeus, worldspan, sabre, Galileo) and destination management systems (tiscover.com, feratel, TOMAS) are connected. Since Lodgit Desk can transmit not only vacancies, but also prices, and minimum/maximum booking durations (MinLoS, MaxLoS), we are certified as a premium partner of CultSwitch.
DIRS21 channel management enables centralised data maintenance and automatic data transfer from DIRS21 to portals like booking.com, Hotel.de, HRS, Venere, Expedia, netHotels, Unister, TOMAS, intobis and netHotels. A two-way interface to all booking portals not only transfers vacancies and prices, but also sends bookings from this system back to DIRS21. The DIRS21 channelswitch can be updated via the channel manager interface of the Lodgit hotel software. Online bookings from the connected portals are also transferred directly to the hotel software.
Hotel-Spider offers a high number of connected booking portals. Of these, many are also small localised channels, such as booking Valais or Thüringen Tourism. Here a two-way interface is implemented, so that you send vacancies to the channel manager during synchronisation and import new bookings into the hotel software.
MappingMaster is a new channel manager that can also be used to connect a very large number of online booking channels at a comparatively low cost. Owners of guesthouses, hotels, hostels, inns and vacation apartments can transmit vacancies, rates and even cancellations to all booking channels simultaneously. Thanks to the integrated 2-way XML technology of the MappingMaster Channel-manager, overbookings are effectively avoided.
SiteMinder is the world’s leading channel manager and is used in more than 150 countries. More than 250 distribution portals offer the chance to convert travellers of all countries into guests of your hotel. With its 2-way XML connection to the leading booking portals on one side and to Lodgit Desk on the other, SiteMinder guarantees that hotel businesses of all sizes can increase their revenues and reduce the time and cost required to update their rooms.
If you’d like to recommend to us another channel manager, please don’t hesitate to contact us using the contact form. We look forward to hearing from you!
Fair Pricing
The channel manager interface is an optional add-on module of Lodgit Desk, which is available in our online store. Its activation costs monthly 1.30 € per rental unit (plus 19% VAT) and can only be used together with an existing Lodgit Desk license. When purchasing a channel manager flat rate, the monthly price for an unlimited number of rental units does not exceed € 52.00 per month.
The usage time of the module depends on the remaining time of your license. When purchasing a new license or renewing a license of Lodgit Desk, the module can only be booked for the entire license period. Adding the module later is always possible until the end of the existing Lodgit Desk license.
Important note:
The use of the Channel Manager module requires an account with the channel manager provider (see above) as well as the online booking channels you want to use. This may incur further charges from these providers.
The following restriction applies if the module “Interface: Channel Manager” is used simultaneously with the module “Online-Systems” in Lodgit Desk: For technical reasons, the number of rental units booked for the “Interface: Channel Manager” module can only be equal to, or less than, the number of rental units in the “Online-Systems” module.