Have you ever wondered, what makes your hotel business successful? Can it be the competitive pricing or exotic location for the hotel?
Well, all these are crucial contributing factors for your hotel success but, one of the major factors that contributes more than others is the visibility of your hotel.
Travelers today are getting more tech-savvy and rely on various OTA to look for a stay for their vacation. So, it becomes necessary for your guests to be able to find you.
You might be using a hotel channel manager to manage your listings of various OTAs. However, There’s still a chance that your guest might miss your hotel on the OTAs.
So, in this blogpost we will discuss the top 5 hotel channel manager features you need to use to enhance your business.
What is the need for a hotel channel manager?
In your hotel you might get bookings through walk-ins or by phone call. The guests can also make the booking through your hotel website or there’s a good chance that they use your social media page if you offer the booking facility on it.
Other booking options your guests have are through a travel agent or through popular online travel agencies.
While your guests are spreading themselves over to so many places, as hotelier, you need to make yourself visible in many of these places.
Managing the bookings on these many places and channels becomes quite a challenge when performed manually.
A hotel channel manager is software that helps you to sync your room rates and inventories and helps you to improve the efficiency of your booking process.
So, if a guest has booked the room through any channel say Airbnb, then the room gets automatically closed for booking on other channels.
Any updates in pricing are automatically updated on the connected channels.
As a hotelier, you can view and edit all the information using a single dashboard on a channel manager.
Below mentioned are the top hotel channel manager features that you need to use.
Hotel Channel Manager features that you need to use.
All-in-one features:
A hotel channel manager is a flexible tool that can connect with other software such as booking engines, Property management software, revenue management software, and many others.
This allows hoteliers to integrate the data across channels and platforms or to get better insights into high-performing and underperforming areas across their business.
Booking Engine
With the booking engine, you can accept reservations from the guests directly on your website. So, There’s no need to rely on third-party sites such as online travel agencies or other distribution channels to gather the reservation details.
With this, you can save on the fee that distribution channels charge for hotel booking.
While selecting a hotel channel manager, consider a channel manager that offers a mobile-optimized version of the booking engine feature. This is crucial for your business as nowadays majority of the bookings are done on mobile devices.
Guest Profile Building
Personalizing the guest experiences is one of the crucial strategies that hoteliers apply to have a long-term relationship with the guests.
With this feature, you can store your guests’ information such as payment details which will speed up the booking process. Also, you can store your guest’s personal preferences which will help you to prepare for their better stay.
Connected Rooms
Connected rooms are a feature through which you can have different selling options for the same room.
You can sell two conjoining rooms as one big room so that joint families can enjoy their stay better.
Once the booking is confirmed, the related connected rooms are automatically closed to avoid double booking. With this feature, you can offer your guests multiple options for booking and give you more options for maximizing hotel revenue.
Accounting software integration
In the hospitality industry, the requirements and taxation are always changing. Therefore, you need to work with a solution that is specially built for accounting.
While choosing an accounting software make sure it has all the crucial features such as deposit recording, P&L reports, and all the other reports that cover important hospitality KPI.
It is equally important for your hotel channel manager to be connected with the accounting software to prevent double data handling.
Conclusion
We have learned from this blog the importance of a hotel channel manager and it’s a must-have feature you need to use. As a hotelier, you need to consider these features before choosing the right channel manager for your hotel.
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