How does distribution channels help you sell more? Well, simple mantra – More Visibility, More bookings. Vacation rental channel management help you in getting more bookings by increasing the visibility of the property. There has been a lot of buzz around the words, Vacation Rentals Channel Marketing recently. In-order to explore more, lets dig deep into the concept.
The idea was derived from the age-old GDS (Global Distribution Systems). GDS has a universal data standard defined and the leading operators adhered to this standards in order to sell their inventories over GDS.  GDSs are still used in industries like Hotels, Flights, Cars and Trains. Even though the vacation rental channel managers are based on this concept, main operators like Homeaway and Expedia used their own data standards. The players who came after them also kept on creating their own standards of data communication. Although, few of them tried following Homeaway standard. The complications started when property managers of apartments for rent or vacation rental owners wanted to list their properties on the main vacation rental portals. For this they had to add properties, update availability and pricings on all marketing webites which became complicated due to the non-standardized data availability.
It was at this time, the channel manager came into the play, Channel managers are proactively connected to different distribution channels in real time. Property owners just need to connect their system with the channel manager which is already connected to almost all distribution channels. Just one connection and you are all set to go! This can vary from channel managers having 10 to 100+ distribution partners.
How does channel managers help in managing your properties worldwide real time?
>Provides real time Availability updates, Pricing and Property details.
>Connect to various marketing channels in a single click.
>Choose your distribution channels according to your wish and commisions.
>Receive booking details including guest details.
>Manage all your rentals in one place.
>Increase in your property reach and visibility, increasing the chances of your property getting booked.
>No manual entries or over-bookings
How are channel managers connected normally?
>Connect your vacation home rentals software to the channel manager.
>Connect through your house rental booking software through Channel manager’s API .
>Use the property management system provided by channel manager to connect with distribution channels.
>ICal Sync – You can use ICal sync to update availability in your master calendar.
What do channel managers earn from me for distributing my properties?
>Cost will be booking based, which will be a percentage (%) of your property booking amount.
>Cost may also be subscription based, monthly or annually.
Great, Now you might be thinking, How you can connect your system immediately to a channel manager and increase your revenues? Don’t worry, We can help you with that.
How Vafion can help you in providing faster distribution channel integration?
Vafion has been providing integration services exclusively to the vacation rental industry. As a result, we have the expertise integrating with all most all players in this industry.  Similar channel integrations for various customers urged our engineering team to develop a platform for this purpose. This platform can reuse our learning curve associated with a particular channel integrations. Eventually, our engineering team developed a platform which serve this purpose – Vafion Integration Platform . It has three components namely;
>An Integration Hub –Â which is a lightweight adapter container used to deploy various supplier specific adapters to connect to specific APIs.
>A Gateway Web-API –Â which is a RESTful layer, hosted to receive and process requests from various UI-client and B2B systems
>A Data Bridge – which is a multi-utility batch server used for bulk data load to and fro from various Data Sources like DB, XML, etc.
>A single page application which will be a client application.
This platform uses adapters which can be custom made for each distribution channel. These adapters will fast-track the efforts in establishing channel connections. In effect, it helps in reducing the integration efforts considerably. Our ability to leverage the learning curve associated with various integrations is  what makes to be a leader in vacation rental channel integrations. This makes us a sensible option than your technical team or any other technology provider who doesn’t has much experience with a similar integration. We differentiate ourselves from them  in terms of speed, cost effectiveness and error handling while performing vacation rentals channel integrations for your company.
We at Vafion, specialize in providing product engineering services to hospitality and travel companies. Let’s talk about your challenges in vacation rental channel management. Please drop your email-id and a message for our consulting team.
Please write to info@vafion.com to know more about vacation rental channel marketing.
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