Channex: How we work with Revenue Management Systems (RMS)

How do we connect PMS with RMS with the unique Channex ability

What is a Revenue Management System?

Essentially it’s a tool that will take pricing and other data from the hotel, figure out some market data from the competition such as their prices and then calculate the optimum price per night for the property.

The hotel manager or revenue manager will then take these prices and insert into the PMS or Channel Manager. But today they expect the system to do this manual work for them also.

What do RMS systems need to do their job?

All Revenue Management Systems need 2-3 things to work effectively

1. ARI (Availability, Rates & Inventory) information of the hotel property
2. Optional: All bookings from PMS or just online bookings from CM/CRS
3. ARI Push: To push any changes back to PMS system

RMS issues today

Currently there is a major issue for RMS systems to connect the hotel. With over 1000 PMS in the world and maybe around 50 RM Systems you can see the difficulty.

Common Issues:

1. PMS doesn’t have API to give ARI
2. PMS doesn’t have API to take ARI back
3. PMS doesn’t have API to provide booking information
4. PMS has big restrictions on how fast you can read and push ARI so you don’t break their system. It’s common for some of the big older PMS to have 1 full sync per day per property.
5. Too many PMS to connect to, especially long tail PMS with less than 500 properties.

Channel Managers and Central Reservation Systems help?

They can help but it doesn’t solve the issue 100%. Many systems such as the leading Channel Managers will have many RMS connections on their list but there are a few issues.

1. Agreements are hard to get. Many systems will turn down RM systems unless they bring big volumes of hotels or pay fees.
2. When pushing prices back they are not fed back to the PMS. This means most RM systems still need to connect the PMS to push back the ARI
3. Most don’t provide booking data, or can’t provide booking data without the Pii (Personal identifiable information) information. RMS don’t need people names and numbers etc. They just need the booking data.

How can Channex can help RMS?

We have a special feature that was planned to help RM solutions early on in our design, also some other bonuses that will make us the number one platform to connect with.

1. We connect long tail PMS. Most RMS you will have direct connections to large PMS such as Oracle, Protel etc. But the 1000 small PMS are hard to spend valuable resources to connect with.
2. ARI push back to PMS — We built all our PMS connections with a 2 way ARI connections. So if you push ARI to Channex we can also push this back to the PMS.
3. We are easy to get agreements with, modern Json API, Choice of Push and Pull connections.
4. No Rate Limits or API limits: You can push and pull data as much as you like, we built our technology so we don’t mind you pushing a 6000 message update for 1 property. We control the rate these updates go back to the PMS and OTA so everyone is happy and systems are stable.

Is Channex the magic bullet for RMS?

We certainly help a lot in terms of 2 way ARI but there is one thing we don’t help with…

• Offline PMS Bookings

We can provide all the bookings that flow via Channex in a GDPR friendly way with a great API but there will be a number of bookings made offline direct on the PMS.

If the RM system needs all bookings including the Offline PMS bookings then they will need to build the link to the PMS to collect all bookings.

If you have an RM system and wish connectivity to more PMS systems for a 2-way ARI please get in touch with me at evan@channex.io