As one of the largest online travel agencies, Booking.com is a great place to list your vacation rental, especially if you want to reach international travelers. The platform boasts millions of daily visitors searching for a place to stay and can offer you a lot of exposure, no matter where your vacation rental property may be.
But if you want to succeed in a highly competitive vacation rental market and increase your bookings, you can’t rely only on one distribution channel. You should list your property on multiple websites, including major players like Vrbo and Airbnb.
Managing your listing on multiple websites is very time-consuming, especially if you manage several properties, and there’s always room for human error. Luckily, there’s a more efficient way to run your Booking.com property on multiple platforms—use channel manager software that will save you time and effort.
Booking.com Channel Manager: What Is It?
Channel Manager software allows hosts and property managers to centralize and manage their property’s data, such as availability and pricing, on multiple websites from a single platform.
The Booking.com channel manager helps you expose your listings to a wider audience without the stressful process of managing each booking platform individually. It lets you automatically update your availability, rates, and reservations across several booking channels in real time using API connections.
When a guest books their stay on one channel, the data will be synchronized and automatically updated on all the other channels where you market your vacation rental.
Different channel managers offer different useful features, some of which can help manage bookings and sync calendars and pricing on multiple channels. Vacation rental apps with a channel manager feature, like Hospitable, allow you to automate almost every aspect of your short-term rental business.
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Booking.com Channel Manager: What Can It Do for Your Business?
A channel manager is an essential tool for any vacation rental property owner or manager who has listings on multiple vacation rental websites to gain more visibility and increase occupancy and revenue.
If you opt for it, you can manage your listings on Booking.com without logging in to the Extranet. Moreover, you’ll be able to keep all your listings on other channels up-to-date without adding to your workload. A channel manager lets you quickly update your prices across online providers all in one place and not worry about juggling different websites.
Additionally, channel manager software for vacation rental can integrate with your direct booking website. It ensures that guest reservations and property information are quickly updated and consistent across all online platforms.
When a guest makes a reservation on one booking platform, the channel manager automatically blocks the corresponding dates on other platforms. This way, it eliminates the chance of double bookings, which lead to cancellations and penalties.
Hospitable’s Channel Manager: How It Works
Hospitable’s channel manager integrates with Airbnb, Booking.com, and the Vrbo family of websites. It allows you to efficiently manage bookings from all channels and run your entire STR business from one convenient dashboard. Our system will protect you from double-booking with instant calendar synchronization across platforms.
You can use our channel management features to manage availability and prices for your Booking.com listings after you’ve created an account with this OTA platform. Here’s what you need to do to connect each of your Booking.com properties to Hospitable:
- First, go to the Connected Accounts page and click the Connect with Booking.com button.
- Then, you have to verify that your Booking.com setup meets our requirements and provide (or confirm) your email address linked to Booking.com.
- Next, you need to specify how many vacation rental properties you need to connect and provide the accommodation ID for all your properties.
- After that, you must set a markup rate to allow our system to push rates from the Hospitable.com calendar.
- Now, follow the connection flow to connect to Booking.com, and if you see any prompts, select the properties you want to connect to.
- Allow the connection and wait for a few minutes until your connection is approved.
- You may need to refresh the page to see the confirmation.
After you complete your Booking.com setup, you can use Hospitable’s Calendar to set prices for your Booking.com listing. You can set a single guest price for all listings across your channels for that specific property, including Booking.com.
Then, the system will push the base price and any markup rates for that associated listing or channel to your connected channels. Hospitable also offers integrations with the top dynamic pricing tools that help you push smart pricing to all channels.
Additionally, Hospitable can help you automate your communication with your guests using Booking.com messaging tools. You just need to configure messaging rules under Guest Experience and will be able to manage conversations with your Booking.com guests from Hospitable’s Inbox.
Have conversations with your guests even when you sleep
Final Thought
Using a channel manager for your listings on Booking.com and other distribution channels can save you a lot of time. It eliminates repetitive tasks that you’d otherwise have to do manually and reduces the chances of making mistakes that can lead to double bookings.
A channel manager also helps you keep your listings up-to-date. As a result, you get more time to focus on other important aspects of your short-term rental business, such as marketing your property and providing an excellent experience to your guests.
You may also want to check out our blog post that covers the Booking.com cancellation policy and find tips on dealing with cancellations and how to reduce them as a host.
