Since Expedia is a global online travel agency, using it to market your vacation rental can allow you to reach more travelers interested in booking a stay at your property. If you want to list your property on Expedia and combine it with other channels like Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Agoda, and your direct booking website, using a channel manager helps.
Not sure whether investing in an Expedia channel manager is worth it? In this blog, we’ll talk about what channel managers do and how they can help optimize the management of your vacation rental business.
Listing your vacation rental properties on multiple channels is a smart move that can help you increase visibility, get more bookings, and diversify your revenue streams. Managing bookings across various channels can be a headache if you do it manually. However, you can ensure that everything runs smoothly if you streamline your operations using vacation rental software like Hospitable. With our tool, you can easily manage your listings on multiple booking platforms from one place and put your business on autopilot.
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What Is Expedia Channel Manager?
A channel manager is a software tool designed to help property owners and managers efficiently manage their listings across various online booking platforms. It automatically syncs and updates your nightly rates, calendar availability, and bookings across several booking websites simultaneously in real-time, leaving a minimal margin for errors.
Expedia channel manager allows vacation rental hosts and property managers to optimize the management of their Expedia listings by automating essential tasks. It also makes it easy to keep track of your bookings across different platforms, prevent double bookings, set consistent pricing, and manage all listings in one dashboard.
Why Use a Channel Manager?
For several reasons, hosts and property managers need a vacation rental channel manager.
It allows you to list your properties to multiple booking sites, reaching a wider audience of travelers who can become your potential guests. This can help you get more bookings, increase your occupancy rate, and maximize your revenue. Tapping into new markets is especially important during a slow season when the demand is low.
It saves you time and reduces stress. Manually updating prices and availability on all connected channels can be time-consuming, inefficient, and prone to mistakes, which may lead to double-bookings and poor guest experience. A channel manager automates this process, so you don’t need to log into each channel’s interface many times throughout the day. This way, you can have more time to focus on business growth and essential aspects of hosting that require a personal touch.
It operates in real-time to ensure accurate and up-to-date availability and prices across all channels. This is particularly advantageous because OTAs often rank listings higher in search results when they have real-time availability, leading to better visibility and more bookings.
How Hospitable Can Help You Manage Listings on Multiple Channels Hassle-Free
Hospitable is all-in-one vacation rental software with a comprehensive set of advanced features. Our tool allows STR hosts to automate 90% of repetitive daily tasks and to list their properties on multiple channels without worrying about juggling calendars, messaging, and cleaners across bookings.
With Hospitable, you can sync your calendars on key booking channels, such as Airbnb, Agoda, Vrbo, Booking.com, and your direct booking website, and manage all your bookings from a single dashboard. Our tool will ensure your calendar is always updated to avoid double bookings, which may lead to bad reviews.
Hospitable makes it easy to provide your guests with the necessary information at the right time. You can receive all messages from across platforms in one centralized inbox and never miss a booking request or a question from your guests. Hospitable’s automated, AI-powered guest communication tools can help ensure personalized communication with your guests via messages during all customer journey stages, saving you time and effort. You just need to set messaging rules.
You can create pre-written responses to common guest questions, and AI will help us determine when they are asked. Then, our system will send quick responses to your guests on your behalf. You can also use AI tools to help you write detailed responses to guest messages based on the message context and booking details. AI will generate a draft message, which you can review and edit if necessary to add a personal touch before you hit send.
Your guests will receive replies to their messages on the same platform from which they messaged you. They will never know that Hospitable helped you to provide them with quick answers.
Have conversations with your guests even when you sleep
Hospitable integrates with top dynamic pricing tools that automatically set the best price for your properties based on supply, demand, seasonality, day of the week, specific dates, and other factors. Our system will push prices to all platforms, assigning correct markup rates to help you optimize your revenue.
Hospitable also allows you to connect different niche channels with iCal imports, expanding your property’s reach to additional platforms, including Furnished Finder, Expedia, Houfy, Hipcamp, Hopper, and many others. You just need to copy the iCal link from your booking platform and paste it into the iCal import field of your Hospitable property.
Then, our system will fetch calendar updates from the connected iCal feed every hour to ensure that new bookings, blocked dates, and cancellations are reflected in your calendar on Hospitable. The iCal-imported bookings are treated like any Direct or channel-based booking, so you can take advantage of automated workflows, such as assigning tasks to your team, upselling premium add-ons, and automated messaging while using AI features.
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Hospitable has direct integrations with major OTAs and supports iCal imports, so you can import bookings from channels where Hospitable doesn’t have a native API connection, helping you manage your availability across various websites. Our tool also offers a variety of advanced features, which you can use to streamline your routine tasks and keep your calendars in sync. With Hospitable, you can make your business more efficient and ensure a better experience for you and your guests.
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