We have had several contacts with different channel managers, and we have arrived to the conclusion that our system has so many complexities that the channel managers do not support.
For example:
- With CloudHotelier you can have different prices depending on the room occupation, in the channel managers pricing is per room type
- With CloudHotelier you can set several offers or discounts, depending on the date of the reservation, the number of days, etc. We have Early Booking, Long Stay, Special Offer, Last Minute bookings that are really hard to deal with the channel managers, as they only support different rate types per room
- With CloudHotelier you can set different pricing depending of the board: room only, breakfast included, half board, full board, and all included. This is also hard to deal with the channel managers.
- Not to mention extras, packages and promotions
Instead of using a channel managers the most part of our clients manually manage the 4-5 main operators in the market, because this operators already have agreements to distribute their product to the most part of the world wide web. For example, in Spain, if you have your property active in booking.com, expedia and hotelbeds you are covering the 80% of the internet and the 95% of the reservation sources. That's the reason we recommend not to use channel managers.
So, the most part of our costumers do not use channel managers at all, and also the direct channel (your website) should be treated with special care, as it should be the most profitable of all the hotel market mix. This is valid for big and medium companies, as well as small hotels.
