What is a Channel Manager and Do You Really Need One?

Mar 11th, 2024

Have you felt the overwhelm that comes with making an update to your vacation and short-term rental listings? If you’re a property manager working with hundreds of properties, you could spend days dedicated to manually updating your listings across VRBO, Airbnb, and all the other short-term rental sites and OTAs where you connect with guests and clients.

This is where a vacation rental channel manager can come into the picture. With the right integrations, you could make a single update and push it out to all sites with just a few clicks.

What is a channel manager and do you need one to succeed in this space? Let's take a closer look at whether this savvy move is the next right step for you.

What is a Channel Manager?

When you spend all your time managing the day-to-day tasks of your business, it’s difficult to find the time and energy to make strategic growth moves that take you to the next level. Manually managing all your listing profiles across several platforms is a prime example – it’s a tedious yet necessary task that can take up valuable time.

A channel manager simplifies your day-to-day tasks and automates your processes. This third-party service provider connects the data in your property management software with the OTAs you want to work with.

For example, you can update your rates and availability on all platforms at the same time with the help of a channel manager. This means you might be on third-party sites like Booking.com or Expedia, and the channel manager ensures that your pricing and availability are consistent.

When deciding which channel manager is right for your short-term rentals, you may decide to look for all-in-one solutions. Some property management software solutions have a built-in channel manager, allowing you to do everything from one convenient dashboard.

Leveraging a channel manager in your daily operations can help you scale your income as well as save valuable time and effort. Your software should be able to grow as you do, and a good channel manager can help increase your bookings and simplify your daily task list.

Benefits of a Channel Manager

The ability to update all your listings with just a few clicks is a huge benefit in its own right, but what else can a channel manager do for you? Here are a few other benefits to consider.

Boost Online Presence

There is certainly something to be said for direct bookings from your own custom website and you should strive to have as many direct bookings as possible, but you can reach more customers and hopefully better fill your open bookings by expanding into OTAs. Where before you might have stuck with one or two OTAs for the sake of easy updating, channel managers make it easy to list in more places.

Channel managers simplify the way you reach more guests and clients, boosting your visibility. It only makes sense that this increase in visibility will result in more eyes on your offer – and more bookings.

As an added benefit, spreading your listing beyond a single platform helps mitigate risk. If one third-party site changes its algorithm or the website goes under, your source of revenue is gone too. By making it easy to list everywhere, channel managers help mitigate risk without requiring a full-time person to update each site following a booking.

Stop Double Bookings

A channel manager that’s integrated with your rental management software can keep up with every fluctuation in your availability as someone reserves your short-term rental or equipment. Previously, you might have had to update availability manually or run the risk that you would book the same properties or items twice on two different platforms.

With proper channel management integrations in place, this is a thing of the past.

This can be especially beneficial for maintaining your reputation across the OTAs and short-term rental sites where you’re listed. Frequently canceling on customers due to accidental double bookings could damage your reviews and take away from your ranking in the search results.

Guest Communication

Are you tired of logging into each platform just to check your messages, respond to guest questions, and remind them of their booking? Instead of signing into multiple places to see if you have any messages, you can save time and energy to put toward other aspects of scaling your income and managing a growing business.

Many channel managers pool your communications into one convenient location, allowing you to just sign into the channel manager and respond to all inquiries from there. Some also allow you to set up automatic emails such as reminders about check-in rules or answers to frequently asked questions.

Create Updates for More Appealing Offers

Maybe you’re still in the process of refining your listings and offerings. This might mean that you’re constantly tweaking your photos, the descriptions of your listings, and even your prices, all to be more attractive to your ideal customer. In the past, you could have spent hours trying to rack your brain to remember all of the places where that listing exists.

Forgetting even one single listing could have consequences if your pricing isn’t updated or your cancelation policy isn’t set in stone.

A channel manager allows you to push that information out to all of your booking sites without the headache of remembering them all. Once they are connected to the channel manager, every other aspect of your updates is smooth and automatic.

How to Determine if You Need a Channel Manager

With all of those benefits in mind, you might be wondering whether your unique business could benefit from a channel manager. The short answer is that it depends on the size of your current operation and if you have plans to scale.

If you only manage one or two properties and you’re happy to keep property management as a small side gig, a channel manager might not be worth the extra costs.

On the other hand, property managers who work with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of properties will find a channel manager to be worth its weight in gold. Your time is invaluable; a strategic channel manager simplifies the day-to-day and frees up your time from manual property and listing updates.

For smaller property managers with an eye toward growth, getting started with a channel manager earlier on can make it easier to scale. Even if you only manage 5-10 properties at the moment, organizing and integrating all of the logistics into a channel manager will help you gain familiarity with the software. You’ll already have a system in place every time you add a new property.

A good channel manager may also help you push out your listings to more platforms, giving you greater visibility. With just a few clicks, you might be able to register on several new platforms without a tremendous amount of effort.

If your business wants to save time and effort while maximizing profits and decreasing reservation errors, then a channel manager may be a smart move for you.

We recommend starting your research by looking for integrated channel managers available through your property management software. If you’re still exploring rental management software options, take a look at our list of trusted partners in the vacation rental industry.