Introducing the Solidres Channel Manager — your OTA connections, inside Joomla
For as long as Solidres has existed, selling your rooms on Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, Agoda or Vrbo has meant the same thing: open an account with a channel manager, re-create your property and every room type in their dashboard, copy mapping IDs back and forth, and then run your business out of two systems that both think they are in charge.
Today that changes. The Solidres Channel Manager is live — a channel connection service we operate ourselves, driven entirely from your Joomla administrator. No second dashboard. No second account. No second vendor.
What it actually does
Your Joomla site is the only system you runYour property, your room types and your rate plans are created in the channel manager for you, straight from Solidres. You never re-type your inventory anywhere else, and there is no vendor dashboard to log into. The only thing you still do by hand is pick which channels you want to sell on — and that happens inside your Joomla administrator too.
Change a price, take a booking, cancel one, block a room for maintenance — Solidres works out exactly which dates are affected and sends only those to your channels. Nothing else is touched, so a one-night price change is a one-night update, not a full re-push.
In the other direction, a booking made on a channel lands in Solidres within seconds as a normal reservation, with the guest, the dates, the rooms and the per-night prices the channel sent. Modifications and cancellations are applied the same way.
Solidres stays the master of your inventoryAvailability is calculated from your real rooms, minus confirmed reservations and blocked dates — so your own website and every channel are always selling the same rooms. Alongside availability and nightly rates, Solidres sends minimum stay, maximum stay and stop-sell, and pushes 500 days of both the moment a room type goes live.
Close your channels on the dates you would fill anywayThis is the feature we are most pleased with. On peak dates — a festival, a conference, high season — every OTA booking costs you commission on a room that would have sold regardless. Channel restrictions let you stop-sell those dates on your channels, or shape stays with closed-to-arrival and closed-to-departure, per rate plan — while your own website keeps taking bookings, commission-free. Restrictions push out like any other update, and reopening the dates is one click.
Your whole season in one screenEvery plan includes the new Inventory grid: availability, nightly rates, stay restrictions and stop-sell flags laid out per day, in one spreadsheet-style screen inside Joomla — showing exactly the numbers your channels see. Edit daily-mode rate plans straight in the grid, or bulk-update whole date ranges across several room types and rate plans in one pass, and the changes sync out like any other update. No more hopping between rate plan screens to prepare a season.
Nothing is ever silently droppedIf a channel booking arrives for dates you no longer have free, Solidres still saves it — as a cancelled reservation with a note explaining why — so you can see the overbooking and deal with it. Front Desk compares your Solidres numbers against what your channels currently hold, so a mismatch is visible immediately, and the activity log records every sync in both directions.
Honest about the state it is inA status badge on your properties and room types tells you whether syncing is healthy, needs attention soon, or has stopped. If your subscription lapses, nothing is destroyed: your channel connections and mappings stay exactly as they are, and incoming channel bookings are held for you and delivered as soon as you renew.
You connect your own Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, Agoda or Vrbo accounts, and the guest relationship stays with you. We take no commission on any booking, and there is no per-booking fee and no cap on how many bookings you receive — what a channel charges is between you and that channel.
Your reservations, your guests and your data stay in your own Joomla database, handled by plugin code you can read: the Channel Manager plugin and the Inventory plugin are 100% open source, GPL, with no encoding, like the rest of Solidres. What your subscription pays for is the connection service we operate for you between your site and the OTAs.
What you need
- A Joomla site with Solidres 4.2.0 or newer.
- A Solidres subscription — any level. It carries the Rate Plan and Limit Booking plugins, which is where the prices, stay lengths and blocked dates sent to your channels come from.
- The Channel Manager and Inventory plugins, included with your Channel Manager subscription.
- A working cron job for Joomla’s Task Scheduler — our cron guide walks through it.
- A site reachable from the internet, so channel bookings can be delivered to it.
- A complete property address with map coordinates — channels will not accept a property without them.
- Your own accounts with the channels you want to sell on.
Already running Solidres on a subscription? Then you have the Rate Plan, Limit Booking, Front Desk and Dashboard half of that list already — add a Channel Manager subscription and you are ready to connect.
Plans and pricing
One subscription per property, priced by the number of rooms you actually sync. Only room types you switch on for syncing count towards the limit — a room type you keep off your channels is off your bill too.
- CM Starter — up to 5 rooms — $19/month, billed annually at $190
- CM Small — up to 15 rooms — $35/month, billed annually at $350
- CM Standard — up to 30 rooms — $65/month, billed annually at $650
- CM Plus — up to 60 rooms — $109/month, billed annually at $1,090
- CM Pro — unlimited rooms — $179/month, billed annually at $1,790
Every plan includes all channels, unlimited bookings, no commission, no per-booking fee, the Inventory grid and unlimited support tickets.
The figure per month is the monthly equivalent — you are charged the annual amount once, and there is no automatic renewal: no subscription profile quietly charging your card. We email you before your subscription ends and you renew when you decide to. Your first Channel Manager order is covered by a 30-day money-back guarantee — for any reason, or no reason at all.
How it compares with our MyAllocator and Beds24 integrations
Solidres has connected to MyAllocator and Beds24 for years, and both integrations keep working today — nothing breaks under you. The difference is where the work happens:
- Extra account to open: none, versus one with the vendor.
- Property, room types and rate plans: created automatically from Solidres, versus re-created by hand in the vendor dashboard.
- Mapping IDs: assigned automatically, versus copied over by hand.
- Where you manage channels: inside Joomla, versus in the vendor dashboard.
- Who you contact for help: us, for the whole chain — versus us or the vendor, depending on the problem.
- Billing: one vendor, versus two.
One piece of housekeeping worth saying plainly: the MyAllocator integration is deprecated and will be removed in a future Solidres release. Beds24 stays supported and you can stay on it as long as you like. If you are on MyAllocator, plan the move to the Solidres Channel Manager at a time that suits you rather than leaving it to the last minute. There is no automatic migration between providers yet — switching means disconnecting from your current one and mapping your channels again, so give it a quiet week.
Getting started
- Subscribe to the plan that matches your room count — and to Solidres itself if you are not already a subscriber — then copy your Download ID from your solidres.com account.
- Install the Channel Manager, Inventory, Rate Plan and Limit Booking plugins, set the Channel Manager’s provider to Solidres Channel Manager, and add the three scheduled tasks that keep the sync running.
- Connect your property with one click, then switch syncing on for each room type you want to sell online.
- Map your channels in the channel management screen, run the first full sync, and you are live.
Every step is written out, with screenshots, in How to configure Solidres Channel Manager, and the cron side in How to set up Joomla cron for Task Scheduler. Most properties are connected and syncing the same afternoon; individual channels can take one to two weeks to go live on the channel’s own side.
Try it
The Solidres Channel Manager needs Solidres 4.2.0, released today, so update first — then pick your plan and connect your first property. If one specific channel is the reason you are buying, ask us before you subscribe and we will confirm it.
This is the biggest thing we have built for Solidres, and it is the start rather than the finish. Tell us how it goes — your feedback shapes where it goes next.
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