Hospitality is an ever-shifting industry in terms of its speed and the changes happening within it. Hotel managers have a plethora of responsibilities they bear, including managing occupancy rates to providing guests with excellent services. This has to do with the absence of a systems and process approach to working that prevents the creation of havoc. Another area that can prove to be of tremendous help to hotels in enhancing efficiency is the area of channel management. A hotel software channel manager is a crucial tool in this regard, helping hotels streamline their distribution processes and manage their online presence effectively across multiple booking channels.
Global Ovation has a good channel manager (CM) because it centralizes all booking channels in one interface. This eliminates over selling, rate competition and lost sales due to wrong and outdated pricing and accommodation blocs.
1. Simplifies Distribution
When more than one sales channel is present, distribution becomes easier when integrated on a CM platform. Through the OTheo system, hoteliers are provided with a consolidated view of the rooms that are available for booking and the rates assigned to the rooms by the booking sites. This helps in saving time as they do not have to log into various OTAs separately to update information. Through automation, they also avoid occurrences of mistakes such as double entry on the records. Hence, real time rates and availability is more suitable for hotels to control room inventory across various sales channels. This eliminates the occurrence of a case whereby the hotel has booked clients only to find that all the rooms have been let out to other clients.
Through the central management system any changes to pricing strategy can be made across all channels promptly and effectively. This feature of dynamic pricing allows hoteliers to optimize revenue as a function of the time and external rate benchmark from competing properties. The system also comes with extensive analytics and reporting capabilities that give a clear view of channel performance, booking trends while allowing the hotelier to make smart distribution choices.
2. Facilitates the rate and availability control
They also facilitate rate and allotment manipulation with the various sales channels. Hotels can establish special tender types and room allotments by sales channels. This facilitates customized distribution. For instance, certain hotels may give more space on their websites to booking. com than less popular OTAs or provide special offers that are not available anywhere else. Availability in hotels is also flexible and can be opened and closed across all the leading channels. Thus, if they reach an overbooking point on this particular OTA – Expedia, the rates can be pulled out from this OTA but the hotel will continue taking bookings from other OTAs.
These micro-level rates manipulation with yield management sophistication enables hotels to hike or reduce their prices according to demand forecast, seasonality and local events. With the importance of dynamic pricing in this sector, you can rest assured that your prices will be updated to have a competitive edge automatically across all channels based on predefined rules. It also allows hotels to design and manage packages or bundles that can be promoted on various channels, broadening the scope of their marketing efforts in order to target a variety of customer segments. It also enables more control towards keeping a rate parity across all your channels especially for the OTAs to maintain right relations and avoid any contractual disputes.
3. Drives Parity & Control
Fee disputes arise from different room prices and availability for the same rooms in different sales channels. A solution for managing communication channels also controls price by ensuring that they are consistent across the various channels. This, in a way, establishes some degree of uniformity which, in turn, helps make the experience of using the application a better one.
Customers will not be able to get those rooms at cheaper rates anytime in the future after they have booked with the company. It also helps in maintaining brand values since adjustments to the rate may lead to perceptions of instability. In addition to parity, hotel managers also benefit from improvements in inventory availability. Centralization of decision-making eliminates cases of overbooking, allocating distressed rooms, and last-minute cancellation of confirmed bookings.
4. Utilises Revenues and Reduces Expenditure
Channel management does not only mean selling hotels’ services but increasing its revenues. Software forecasts the actual demand and bookings through various platforms and based on earlier trends. With distribution now a strategically important variable, it is possible to determine which sales channels are most effective, allowing hotels to adjust distribution as needed. This is by enhancing quotas on the rooms provided to OTAs with better conversion rates and reducing on those with low returns.
Strategic distribution avoids the scenario of declining other bookings on high revenue generating platforms due to full occupancy. Also, use of automated rate and availability management also reduces costs in work hour expenses for manual operations. Staff are not required to, for instance, actively track and edit several channels. From the increased revenues and increase in productivity, organizations’ bottom lines are boosted hence saving costs.
5. Enhances Operational Efficiency
In general, channel management software helps improve the efficiency of IT systems in hotel revenue management. The implementation of the systems brings off repetitive activities away from the hotel employees’ activities that are value-adding. Data-backed insights enhance decision making as well. In that light, these processes are effective in reducing wastage while at the same time increasing the rate of completion of tasks. Sharing of real-time data increases the speed at which updates are rolled out across the various platforms. A shorter TAT also benefits the hotel against other competitors regarding the distribution of offers and managing reservations. The operating leverage means that hotel operation is flexible in order to be able to respond to the demands of the market.
Conclusion
This paper has shown that it will be important for hotels to integrate technology in their operations as a way of managing successful organizations in the modern world. This is because of the role played by channel management software and comprehensive hotel management software which ensures that rates and inventory are consistent across the major booking channels.