How a channel manager works
One calendar, many places to book. What happens in the minutes after a guest books, why rooms get sold twice without one, and how to tell whether your property needs it yet.
· 3 min read · Northlight
A property that sells rooms in more than one place has more than one calendar. Booking.com has one, Agoda has one, Airbnb has one, and your own website has one. Each of them believes it knows which rooms are free. A channel manager is the piece of software that makes them all agree.
What it does
A channel manager holds one calendar and one set of rates for the whole property. It is connected to each booking site, and to your own website, and it does two things all day.
It sends out your availability and prices. Change a rate or close a room once, and the change goes to every site.
It brings in bookings. When a guest books on any site, the booking comes into the channel manager, the room is taken off the calendar, and the change goes out to every other site.
What happens when a guest books
A guest in Colombo books your garden room on Agoda for the second week of January. Agoda tells the channel manager. The channel manager marks the room as taken for those nights and tells Booking.com, Airbnb and your website that it is no longer free.
A room sold on any channel closes on the others, usually within a few minutes. Those minutes are the reason it is not a guarantee: two guests on two sites can, very rarely, book the last room at almost the same moment. A good channel manager makes that rare instead of routine, which is what it is for.
What happens without one
On a small property, the owner does the channel manager’s job by hand: a booking arrives on one site, and they log into the others and close the room. It works when bookings are few and the owner is quick. It fails on the busy weekend, or the night the owner is asleep, and the result is a room sold twice and a guest who has to be turned away.
When a property needs one
A rough guide, not a rule:
- One or two channels, a few bookings a week. Closing rooms by hand is usually fine.
- Three or more channels, or bookings most days. The chance of a double booking becomes real, and a channel manager pays for itself the first time it prevents one.
- Rates that change by season, weekday and length of stay. Changing them in four places by hand is where mistakes come from, and one calendar removes them.
What it costs, and who runs it
Channel managers charge monthly, usually per property or per room, because they are a service that runs all the time, not a thing you buy once. That is why our Connected websites carry a monthly fee: your calendar is kept in sync by a channel manager we set up, pay for and run. You never log into it. You use your own site.
If you are not sure which you need, our websites page sets the three kinds side by side, and the first call is free.
