If you’re a B&B owner or small hotel manager, you know how important it is to ensure all your channels are syncing properly. You want to make sure that when someone books a hotel room using an online travel agency (OTA) channel like Expedia, your overall inventory reduces by one—including on your website, social channels, and Booking.com listings.
A mistake could lead to a double-booked room, or a significant financial loss if there’s a room rate error. This type of syncing has always been important, but in the post-2020 landscape of changed consumer travel habits, it’s even more critical to avoid issues and retain customers.
That’s where hotel channel management software comes in. These tools let you avoid overbooking by having one system manage all your channels. You can set rules to automatically adjust prices (say, increase room prices during a festival weekend), and view metrics to help you optimize where you list your rooms.
If you’re ready to look for a platform, we built this list of hotel channel management software products on Software Advice with the highest ratings from users in the hospitality industry. Products that made the cut are listed in alphabetical order below (read our full methodology).
- Overall hospitality rating: 4.5/5.0
- Notable features: Early access to beta features from Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, and others
Cloudbeds is a cloud-based hotel channel management system and can be used whether you manage a small or midsize hotel, vacation rental, hostel, or B&B. Key features include managing your rooms and rates in one place, real-time updates, and instant, secure payment processing.
Cloudbeds can receive reservations from a number of channels, including Booking.com, Airbnb, HostelWorld, and Expedia. The tool offers channel-specific pricing, so you can set rules to have separate pricing for different channels.
With Cloudbeds, you also get a reporting suite and dashboard, as well as a channel production report so you can see which booking sources perform best and improve your distribution strategy.
The Cloudbeds channel manager is part of a software suite that also includes a property management system (PMS), booking engine, revenue management pricing intelligence engine (PIE), marketplace, and insights tools.
Syncing across channels and reporting in Cloudbeds (Source)
- Overall hospitality rating: 4.6/5.0
- Notable features: More than 100 international and regional online travel agency (OTA ) channels available, and 30+ vacation rental lodging sites
eZee Absolute from eZee Technosys is a cloud-based hotel channel management system designed to help hotels of different sizes and types handle day-to-day operations.
eZee Absolute’s hotel channel manager automatically updates your hotel’s inventory and rates on travel websites. The instant automatic update functionality includes OTAS (hotel booking portals), meta search engines (TripAdvisor, Google Hotel Finder, etc.), global distribution systems (GDS), your hotel website, and your Facebook page.
The system supports rule-based automation changes, meaning you could set a rule to automatically change your pricing during a festival weekend, for example, after a certain percentage of your available rooms are booked. The eZee Absolute portal also includes analytics, so you can see how various channels perform and analyze revenue.
eZee Absolute can integrate with a suite of different tools, including a hotel PMS, hotel website booking engine, and restaurant software.
Monthly reporting in eZee Absolute (Source)
- Overall hospitality rating: 4.0/5.0
- Notable features: 300+ central reservation system (CRS) / PMS integrations
SiteMinder allows you to manage your rooms and rates in real time. The technology includes 400+ distribution channels, deep channel performance insights, and gives you the ability to learn which channels perform best for your property.
SiteMinder also allows you to automate rates and availability across all of your channels. That way, you can maximize occupancy and revenue, and reduce errors.
The SiteMinder platform offers a complete suite of five standalone solutions that help hotels find and attract guests online: a channel manager, online booking engine, website builder, pricing intelligence tool, and global distribution system. Hotels can choose to use one or all of these solutions, depending on their needs and goals.
SiteMinder also offers integration with a property’s existing PMS or CRS to facilitate easy data sharing between tools.
Channel manager dashboard in SiteMinder (Source)
Don’t leave money on the table; let a hotel channel manager optimize room pricing
In addition to a property management system, a channel manager can be crucial for maximizing profits and reducing overbooking errors. Not only does your room availability sync across channels to keep customers from getting frustrated, but you can easily change your pricing when needing to book more rooms, or when availability decreases.
If you’re interested in finding the right hotel channel management software for your business, we invite you to talk to one of our Software Advice advisors. Software Advice guides you to the right software with real advice from real people—our advisors have helped hundreds of professionals in the hospitality industry. We’re here to help you find solutions that meet your needs and budget.
You can chat online with an advisor right away, or schedule a phone call. In just a few minutes, your advisor will help you create a shortlist of tools that meet your needs.
Methodology:
The five products with the highest ratings from hospitality reviewers are featured in this article.
To be considered for this article, products must:
- Meet the market definition for hotel channel management software: Channel management software allows users to sell all their rooms on all connected booking sites at the same time. It will automatically update your availability in real-time on all sites when a booking is made, when you close a room to sale, or when you want to make bulk changes to your inventory.
- Offer the following core features: room inventory, dynamic pricing, channel analytics
- Have at least 20 reviews from hospitality reviewers in the past two years
Only reviews from users in the hospitality industry were evaluated to select the products featured in this article.
Note: The applications selected in this article are examples to show a feature in context and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations. They have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.
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