Posts Tagged ‘Direct bookings’

If you sell the same room on your own website and on one or more booking sites, something has to tell each of them when a night is sold. When nothing does, two guests book the same room, and one of them gets a phone call nobody wants to make.

There are two ways to pass that message along, and both are sold under the same word: sync. They move very different things. iCal sync moves blocked dates, after a delay. A channel manager moves availability, rates, restrictions and the reservation itself, as they change. Which one you need depends on your property, and for some properties the lighter one is enough.

If you run a small property, the chances are that most of your bookings arrive through online travel agencies, the OTAs. It works. The platforms bring guests you could never have reached on your own, the bookings keep coming, and you pay a commission on nearly every night you sell.

That arrangement has a name worth saying out loud: you are renting your demand, not owning it. The visibility, the terms and, in a real sense, the guests belong to someone else, and they can change without asking you. The answer is not to leave the OTAs. It is to run a booking channel of your own beside them, and to make it the one everything else follows.

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.