Internet Internet booking sites are sometimes called Online Travel Agents (OLTA) or Internet Distribution Systems (IDS) or Travel Websites. Everyone who has ever tried to book a flight or a hotel over the internet knows them and they all manage to display hundreds of destinations and thousands of hotels. So how do they know about these hotels and how do they get availability and rates?
There are 4 ways this happens:
- Hotels update their information through the site’s extranet, an area of the website especially created for the purpose and that requires a login and password issued to the hotel by the site operator.
- The site is connected to one or more other sites and receives rate and availability information from the other sites.
- Through interfaces with the hotel company’ s Central Reservation System (CRS) or Property Management System (PMS).
- Through Channel Managers. Channel Managers are companies that provide a way to update multiple channels from 1 single screen.
RezExchange connects to an increasing number of booking sites using interfaces that provide functionality that no other system can match.
Some sites allow more functionality than others, but RezExchange is committed to creating the most functional interface possible. And all interfaces include the download of reservations. At a configurable interval RezExchange will check if there are any new or modified reservations for each property on the RezExchange system and push them to the PMS database using the PMS connection.
This way, the PMS is continuously up to date and availability is always accurate. Similarly, when availability in the PMS drops below the allotment given to a channel, RezExchange will update the channel with the new availability. This allows hotels to keep their inventory available on all channels connected, without the risk of overbooking the hotel.