An Online Travel Agent (OTA) Manager - sometimes referred to as a Channel Manager - is a program that connects your Property Management System to your property’s listings with Online Travel Agents (OTAs) such as:
Our RezExpert Property Management System incorporates its own inbuilt OTA Manager, RezChannel.
Why then do you need an OTA Manager?
Keep scrolling to read seven reasons why:
How do guests find your property - online! They will type straight into Google “Farmstays in Yackandanah”. What are the first results? Listings from an OTA. Does your property rank on the first page? If not, it's highly unlikely guests will find you - who looks on the 2nd page of Google? If the guest clicks on the OTA search listing, will they find your property? You can’t earn revenue if guests can’t find you!
If guests can only book online via your website, only guests who can find your website will book with you. However, if guests can also book with you via a number of different OTAs, this increases the opportunities guests have to book with you. This will give you more bookings - resulting in more revenue!
Many of our clients who use an OTA Manager report up to a 40% increase in revenue in a very short period of time.
An OTA Manager distributes your inventory availability across all of your chosen OTAs, meaning the same rooms are available on every channel and are sold on a first-come, first-served basis. This avoids Property Managers having to manually update their inventory changes for each OTA listing.
Most OTAs are huge global conglomerates with seemingly infinite marketing budgets and brand recognition you and I could only dream of. Use it to your advantage! Your farmstay in Yackandanah can’t afford to sponsor the Cricket World Cup, but Booking.com can! Cricket fans from Bridgetown to Bangalore and everywhere in between, who may have never even heard of Yackandanah before but are now looking at staying at your property - all because of the marketing power of an OTA.
Imagine you’re at the other end of your property with your hands half way down a drain pipe when an email comes through from one of your OTA listings advising you that your last remaining room for this weekend has been booked. That’s great, but now you have to drop everything and run to the office to manually block out your availability for those dates for each of your OTA listings, as well as your Property Management System, all before someone else books the same room! An OTA Manager automatically drops the OTA booking into your RezExpert system, immediately blocking availability. It also updates all of your other OTA listings so they don’t display availability for that last remaining room - eliminating the dreaded possibility of a double booking!
Rather than having to log into multiple OTA portals and multiple screens to change your rates with every single different OTA listing you have, an OTA Manager will incorporate a central screen that allows you to change all of your rates at once - on the same screen at the same time, saving you time and money.
Guests find it incredibly frustrating when on one site it says you’re booked out, but another will let you book! It’s these inconsistencies that will frustrate guests, frustrate you and can lead to double bookings. An OTA Manager updates your property’s availability across all of your OTA listings, as well as your Property Management System, in real time, ensuring consistency and reducing frustration.
Customer service starts as soon as the guest sees the name of your property online, not when they walk in your front doors! If your messaging and branding is clear and consistent across all of your channels, and the booking process is transparent and seamless no matter how they book, this gives your guests a remarkably positive customer service experience.
The result is a greater satisfaction of their experience and increases the likelihood of them rebooking or recommending your property to others. An OTA Manager assists you to achieve consistency across all of your OTA listings.
RezExpert’s Property Management System includes its own inbuilt OTA Manager, RezChannel. For more information on how RezChannel can save you time and increase your revenue, click here.
