What is a hotel channel manager?
A channel manager is software a hotel uses to distribute its rates and availability to many sales channels — OTAs, GDSs, wholesalers and its own website — and keep them in sync.
Without a channel manager, a hotel would update every channel by hand and risk overbooking. The channel manager connects to the hotel’s property management system (PMS) or central reservation system and pushes changes out, then pulls bookings back in.
Where it fits
Channel managers sit on the supply side. Sellers usually connect to hotels through bedbanks, aggregators or direct-connect APIs rather than to a channel manager itself, but the quality of a hotel’s channel setup directly affects availability accuracy and rate parity downstream.