Channel Managers: the features, the benefits, the opportunities

Channel managers have become an incredibly useful tool for managing flight and hotel bookings. However, within the tours, activities and attractions industry, there’s still some confusion around what a channel manager is and how it can actually help.

 This article is here to explain all, and help you decide if integrating a channel manager is the right move for your business. We’ll also touch on what makes ours stand out.

A channel manager is a connectivity tool that links your booking system to multiple online travel agents (OTAs) and resellers.

 In simple terms: instead of you having to manually update availability, pricing, or cancellations on each OTA, a channel manager does it all for you.

If you’re working with – or plan on working with – multiple OTAs like Viator, GetYourGuide and Klook, a channel manager can save you a lot of time and cut out errors making bookings.

Here are four questions to help you decide if a channel manager is right for you:

• Are you ready to scale your business to new markets?
• Do you want to avoid overbooking and pricing inconsistencies?
• Are you working with more than one OTA?
• Do you already have a booking system (in-house or reservation ticketing system) without OTA connectivity?

 If the answer is yes to most of these, a channel manager could really help.  

 However, if you find it easy to talk to your OTAs directly and manage bookings yourself, then you probably don’t need a channel manager.  

First of all, with real-time availability, the moment someone makes a booking all your sales channels update automatically, cutting out SO much manual work. But that’s not the only thing that happens instantly – cancellations and amendments update in real-time. Plus, any updates you make to your experiences in your own system for content and pricing will be pushed automatically to Bókun. You can also push automatically to OTAs that have price and content over API enabled; saving your team time.

We’ve also made sharing tickets really simple with a feature that automatically sends barcodes straight through to resellers. 

As for costs, with booking fees of between 0.5% and 1.5%, ours are amongst the lowest in our industry. Booking fees also decrease as you scale.

There are four big benefits of our channel manager:

More reach
By tapping into a global marketplace of leading OTAs and regional resellers, you can sell your experiences to millions more customers worldwide.

More revenue
Overbookings can be expensive – but with automated availability updates, your inventory stays accurate. Dynamic pricing can also help you maximize revenue. 

Less heavy lifting
You don’t have to build and manage direct APIs to each OTA or reseller. Just connect to Bókun and we’ll manage and maintain all of those connections. 

No disruption
You can keep using your current in-house solution, reservation platform or ticketing system, so there’s zero disruption to your workflow.

When you use Bókun as part of a full-system plan, you can connect and distribute through our marketplace. 

That means selling with global OTAs like Viator, GetYourGuide, Tiqets, Headout, Klook and Musement – as well as 5000+ regional and local resellers. It’s a big shop window!

Hear how Venice Tours increased their revenue by 400% through our marketplace. And  read about what happened when International Friends agreed 28 reseller contracts through Bókun…

We hope this article has helped clear up what a channel manager is all about. If you’d like to put ours to the test, we can easily get a demo set up for you – just get in touch.