How we are set to shake up the hotel distribution landscape

What is Channex.io?

In a nutshell we are a central place for hotels to manage their inventory. This means their prices, availability and restriction for each night. We pass that information onwards to multiple channels like booking.com & Expedia.

This saves lots of time and all bookings come back to one place.

Our customers are technology partners or hotel suppliers that wish to sell their own products as a white label or reseller.

Channel Manager 2.0

If you read the above sentance you would instantly think of a “Channel Manager” you would be very right in thinking this.

We can do everything a current channel manager can do with a few bonus superpowers.

Here are the big differences why you should look to connect our system vs other channel manager brands.

Low Cost Provider

If you sell solutions to small properties or owners you are often competing against manual work, especially in Africa/Asia. Small property owners have extreme sensitivity to prices so selling that big brand channel manager at $100 is not going to fly.

That’s where we can come in, we can provide a white label solution for you to markup from the price of a cup of coffee per month. You can package or sell standalone.

Modern User Interface

Many providers currently have complex or even downright awkward interfaces that the hotel hates to use. It’s not easy to train and support and costs you money. Our solution is designed to be intuitive as simple for nearly any user for daily use.

Speed of Updates

Speedy updating of channels is an essential feature of all channel managers, be 5 mins late on an update can cause an overbooking.

Current hotel distribution systems update channels using a queue, the more hotels they have the more queue’s then need. Let’s say for every thousand hotels you would have 10 queue’s.

This can work great and fast while there is even loads of sporadic use, but in peak usage the system is backed up and can take 30 minutes to push through updates.

We designed the whole system to have a queue per property/channel.

Example:

• 1000 Properties
• 3 Channels connected on Average (3000 Connections)

In this example is all 1000 hotels pushed an update we would have 3000 queue’s created on the fly and pushed in real time.

Another Example: 1 Hotel pushes a price update and has 5 channels connected.

Current Way — The channel manager adds the requests onto the existing queue’s with all the other updates from other properties. Think about this way is like a machine gun.

Our Way — Instead of pooled queue’s every property has its own, but we don’t only provide one for the property but also per channel. Once the updates are completed the queue is removed until it is needed again.

This way is like having a cloud and instead of the rain coming out

This auto scaling is what makes us so different technically and also why we can be the low cost provider in the space. being 10–50 times faster in pushing updates means our server costs are 10–50 times lower also.

Open API

People confuse Open API means just having an API. The difference is huge..

Just having an API means anyone who needs to connect anything must sign NDA’s or Contracts for access. Sometimes even have to pay a big fee or monthly fees!

Open API is a revolution as the API is openly available and anyone and everyone can build on top of it. The needs of hoteliers are getting increasingly complex and lots of new solutions and mini apps needs to be built on top of our systems.

Credit Card Tokenisation

We have a chance to change the way cards get handles between systems with a more secure and cheaper version.

Current Way:

Currently the channel would take a booking from the guest, this card information is passed to the channel manager that stores the booking and the card details. Then this booking and card details is then sent to the hotel property management system with credit card details. The PMS will then the card to a payment gateway to store and be available to charge.

End result? 4 systems are holding the card details

Our Way:

The channel will take the booking from the guest with card details but when we take the booking we pass the card details direct to the payment gateway to store. Now our systems and the property management systems don’t need to manage card details.

End Result? 2 systems holding card details (50% Less)

Bonus: If the property management system uses our solution as it’s only solution it means they don’t need to worry about PCI Compliance. A huge saving!

Conclusion

We will have a faster, cheaper and more secure system by design.

If you are selling to smaller properties that are price sensitive this is the ideal solution to achieve the margins needed to make it cost effective for both parties.

We are still under Private Beta currently (Sep 2018) so please get in touch with me personally to chat about your requirements.