How Channex works for Vacation Rentals and Apartments

Currently the distribution landscape is mixed with Hotel Platforms and Vacation Rental Platforms. We explain why they are essentially the same going forward.

What is the difference between the distribution platforms of hotels and vacation rentals (VR)?

• VR (Vacation Rental) includes both holiday homes and apartments. Hotels are typically rooms in one building while VR can be in multiple locations. This is a key difference.
• Another big difference is per person pricing, hotels are very light on this requirement with majority of rooms for just 1–2 persons. Apartments can be very heavy and require a price per person for up to 8 person apartments or larger.
• Multi Location for VR often means they need multiple Booking.com and Expedia accounts. The hotel distribution platforms were not ready for that difference and cannot do multi connections inside one account.
• VR Distribution platforms were built with only 1 rate plan and each unit being its own “Room Type” Hotel systems have much more flexibility here.

Price and Channels

The main reason for 2 different platforms is the pricing and connected channels. The multi account requirements and per person pricing made the hotel distribution systems very expensive.

VR platforms have a lot of different channels and new ones coming fast, also many hotel channels are starting to add VR content.

What is exactly the same?

Both distribution systems for hotels and VR work with “Room Type” and “Rate Plan” models and connect a lot of the same channels such as Booking and Expedia.

How Channex can work with VR and Hotels?

To us at Channex we see both in the same situation. The main difference is around commercials as the VR properties will need a lot more connections but less bookings per connection.

Example of VR Setup:

10 Apartments (8 Locations)

Requires 8 x Booking.com & 8 x Expedia connections

1 x Airbnb connection

Total 17 channels

For a Hotel with 10 rooms you just need 3 connections. 1 x Airbnb, Expedia & Booking.com

The average bookings in total will be similar

Multi Property and accounts

Hotel systems are 1 property per account while VR platforms are 1 account and multi property.

For Channex we will have one account for multi property as it’s the simplest way to manage.

We can show all 10 accounts room and rates under one page. this is also very good for hotel groups and chains that have a similar requirement.

Room Rates can also be created centrally and distributed to all 10 properties.

It is a funny coincidence that a small 10 apartment owner needs the same multi property features as a hotel group with 10 x Hotels

Hotel and VR Content

As you can imagine having many more properties means handling lots more content like pictures, facilities and descriptions. For this reason most VR platform have built full content connections to the channels.

Hotel platforms mostly have not built the content connections as hotels are already established and creating content for 1 hotel is not a huge job.

In Channex we will offer full content connection to both parties so both can gain from this new feature, this will make connecting new channels a simple process.

Conclusion

In future there will be a big convergence.

Vacation Rentals and Hotels will be essentially the same job from a distribution standpoint.

At Channex we will be first to serve both industries, but we won’t be the last!