A channel manager is software that distributes a hotel's rooms, rates and availability to multiple sales channels such as OTAs, the GDS and the hotel's own booking engine, keeping inventory synchronized in real time to prevent overbooking.
When a room sells on one channel, the channel manager instantly updates availability on all the others. It also pushes rate changes and restrictions from the PMS or RMS out to every connected channel, which removes hours of manual extranet work per week.
The quality of a channel manager is measured by connection depth and update speed. Shallow one-way connections cause rate discrepancies and overbookings. Hotels typically look for certified two-way integrations with their most important OTAs and with their PMS before anything else.
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