A channel manager sends room availability and rates out to Booking.com and other portals and collects the reservations they take. Booking.com builds its API for Connectivity Partners, who go through onboarding on its side, so a hotel with its own website usually connects through a channel manager that is already one. An iCal calendar cannot stand in for it: the iCalendar format (RFC 5545) has no field for a price or a rate.
When a Booking.com reservation bypasses the hotel's system
| Situation | What Booking.com does | How we prevent it |
|---|---|---|
| No acknowledgement within 30 minutes | emails the reservation to the property | acknowledgement goes only after the booking is saved in the calendar |
| A room or rate left unmapped | emails the reservation | we check the mapping before launch and after every change to the offer |
| No rates for the months ahead | expects partners to load at least a full year of rates and availability | we make sure rates and availability cover the year ahead |
One calendar instead of retyping
A booking from the hotel's own website is saved in its own system, and only the new availability goes to the channel manager, so the hotel pays no portal commission on guests who book direct. Once a day we compare the calendar with the channel manager to catch any drift before it turns into a double booking. In the Atrium panel that one calendar is a booking gantt with collision control. Channel manager APIs differ from one another, so we check the scope against the specific provider's documentation before we quote.
The three routes to Booking.com and how the integration runs are on our channel manager integration page.
Was this post helpful?
