Last updated on 18 Jan 2023
Before we go onto what goes into selecting the best channel manager for your hotel, let's try and understand why a channel manager is an absolutely essential product for any hotel or even small accommodation business in today's day and age.
Why Are Channel Managers Indispensable Now?
With the growing percentage share of online hotel bookings across every hotel, it has become extremely important for each hotel owner or accommodation provider to not just be listed on all portals but also manage their presence on these online portals very closely.
Practically every country in the world has at least 4–5 important online portals or online revenue sources who contribute a significant percentage of their overall revenues, but it is very difficult for a hotel manager or owner or reservations manager to keep updating each OTA's extranet manually because the hotel's own reservation chart keeps changing almost every hour as most bookings still happen through offline channels and direct channels.
Small errors or delays in exposing the correct available inventory or rates to any online channel for any future date can either contribute to overbooking of rooms or worse, an underbooking. While overbooking is easy to spot because you will have many guests screaming at your reception, an underbooking is far more difficult to trace because you don't know what potential revenue you are missing out on.
What is a Typical Channel Manager Supposed to Do?
A typical online channel manager for hotels is a technology product which provides a single dashboard for a hotel revenue manager or reservations manager to:
- Update rates and inventories of the hotel's room categories for all future dates onto all online travel portals to ensure parity everywhere
- Whenever a booking or cancellation happens on any online portal, it sends the information to the user and updates the new inventory to all connected portals
- Push different inventories to different online channels or switch off a channel entirely for a certain period
- Set Rate Restrictions like Minimum Length of Stay (MLOS), Blackout dates, Closed for Arrival (CTA) and Closed for Departure (CTD)
- Manage rates for meal plans, occupancy levels and special rates like extra adult and extra child rates across all portals
- Set different rates for different dates for different categories and easily change these rates when required
- Do a live fetch of rates and inventories actually visible on the extranets of each OTA on a real-time basis and spot mismatches
- Integrate to all important revenue sources through official API integration — not dirty sync or screen scraping which is unreliable
- Sync packages or deals running on an OTA with the inventory of the particular room category
Why Choose DJUBO as Your Channel Manager?
Centralized Reservation System (CRS) with Smart Chart
DJUBO CRS comes bundled along with the channel manager. This ensures the hotel gets a single dashboard to manage both online and offline bookings through a single interface. DJUBO CRS seeks to automate channel management by bringing the entire sales operation into a single platform — reducing chances of overbookings or underbookings to almost zero. It comes powered with features like automated room allocation management via a Smart Chart, automated email and voucher coordination, automated payment follow-up and collections, and query conversion tracking.
A True Channel Manager
DJUBO is a true channel manager because it takes care of offline, corporate, direct as well as online revenue channels in a single interface. Since channel management is a loosely used term, most other channel managers stop at only managing your hotel's online channels — which albeit important, only form a small percentage of your overall revenue.
Analytics
DJUBO Hotel Sales Analytics is a full-stack analytics suite that helps a hotel stay on top of its historical and predicted revenue, occupancy, average room rate, and pre-booking trends. It also helps track channel mix and source-wise, weekday-wise, department-wise revenue trends for better decision making.
Automated Revenue Management
DJUBO Revenue Manager is an automated revenue management platform where the hotel can set rules for the channel manager to change rate plans exposed to all channels simply on the basis of changes in occupancy levels. This feature alone can bring high revenue gains and reduce manpower costs.
Rate Shopper
DJUBO Competitor Rate Shopper helps users track their competitor's pricing for future dates. It helps hotels spot demand indicators and movement in market prices faster to react and change pricing sooner.
Reputation Manager
DJUBO Reputation and Review Management provides every hotel the ability to track guest reviews and sentiments online for their own hotel as well as competitors. It also allows responding to reviews from a single interface.
Oversell Protect Feature
Even channel managers with direct OTA integration have a slight chance of overbooking because of server latency. DJUBO offers an oversell protect feature to save the last exposed room from being exposed to OTAs if the user wants to be careful.
Point of Sale and Booking Engine Integration
DJUBO's channel manager seamlessly connects with DJUBO's Point of Sale application to manage the guest's journey post-check-in. It also connects to DJUBO's booking engine which distributes direct rates and inventories to the hotel's own website.
Unique Partnerships and Distribution Reach
While DJUBO is connected to 100+ OTAs, it also brings unique metasearch partnerships with Google and TripAdvisor on both CPC (cost-per-click) and CPA (cost-per-acquisition) models.
Auto Collect for Pay-at-Hotel Bookings
Many pay-at-hotel OTAs like Booking.com have an extremely high cancellation and no-show rate. DJUBO's Auto Collect chases guests for payment collection and gives confirmation when the requisite payment has been made — helping avoid late cancellations and risks in the hotel's revenue strategy.
Review Builder
DJUBO also helps automate a feedback solicitation engine by sending out Thank You mailers post-checkout. Review building on important sources like TripAdvisor is time-consuming and this feature has the potential of improving the hotel's standing and reputation manifold.
Conclusion
While evaluating a channel manager, it's important to consider your needs and look carefully at the feature sets on offer. A channel manager needs to be built for the future with features that enhance the hotel's revenue, reputation, planning, and outreach. With one of the largest hotel product suites in the world, DJUBO is uniquely adept at serving any hotel to accomplish its goals. Request a demo today.
