System selection
An honest comparison of the options against your PMS, channel count and budget. We are not a reseller.
A channel manager is the plumbing between your property management system, your booking engine and every OTA you sell on. When it is mapped correctly, one rate change reaches thirty channels in seconds and your availability is never wrong. When it is mapped badly (the usual case), you get overbookings, phantom availability, rate plans that do not match across channels, and a team that stops trusting the system and starts updating extranets by hand.
We select, configure and test the connection end to end: room types and rate plans mapped one to one, derived pricing rules set, restrictions honoured on every channel, and a controlled go-live where we watch the first bookings land before handing over.
Why most overbookings are a mapping problem
When a property overbooks, the first assumption is that the channel manager failed. It almost never did. What usually happened is that two room types were mapped to one inventory pool, or a rate plan on one channel was linked to the wrong parent, or an allocation was set as a fixed number rather than drawing from the pooled count.
These faults do not show up on the day of setup. They show up on a busy weekend three months later, when the last room sells twice. An audit of the mapping finds them in an afternoon; discovering them through an angry guest at reception costs considerably more.
Choosing the system, without a reseller commission steering the answer
Channel managers differ in the things that matter to a specific property: which PMS they integrate with natively, how many channels they connect at your tier, whether they support derived pricing and restrictions properly, how their support behaves at 11pm on a Saturday, and what they cost per room per month once you add the connections you actually need.
We do not resell any of them. You buy the licence directly at the vendor's price, which means our recommendation is based on fit rather than on margin. Where your existing system is adequate, the honest recommendation is to keep it and fix the configuration.
A go-live you watch, not one you hope about
Switching distribution systems is the one moment when a property is genuinely exposed. We stage it: mapping is completed and tested against a sandbox or a low-demand date range first, restrictions are verified channel by channel, and reservation delivery into the PMS is confirmed with live test bookings before anything else is switched over.
On go-live day someone watches the first rate pushes and the first reservations land. Where we are migrating from an existing system, both run in parallel until the new one is proven, so there is never a window in which your inventory is unmanaged.
Training the people who will use it daily
A perfectly configured system fails within a month if the team does not trust it and starts updating extranets by hand, which is precisely how disparity and overbooking creep back in.
So the handover includes a working session with your reservations and front office staff, a written runbook covering the daily workflow and the common exceptions, and an agreed escalation path for anything unusual. The aim is that the property can run this without us; the retainer is for when you would rather it did not have to.