Initial Channel Connections
In this post we review how to make your initial channel connections and how to publish availability and pricing for your OTA channels.
Step I: Setup Your Rooms
To begin, setup your rooms in your Bellebnb Front Desk under 'My Hotel > Rooms'. Here you can add descriptions and photos for each room type.
Most importantly, you need to add the rooms inventory for each room type. Suppose you create the room type 'Single' with its photos and descriptions. Now suppose rooms 1A, 2A, and 4B in your hotel are of type 'Single'. In the 'Rooms' section for 'Single' you need to add the rooms 1A, 2A, and 4B. So you have 3 rooms of type 'Single' on your property.
Our channel manager will then communicate this information to each of your OTA channels. There are a maximum of 3 rooms of type 'Single'. As reservations are made, our channel manager will send an update to each of your channels to let them know how many rooms of this type are available. This happens automatically for each room type and for each channel.
Step II: Connect with MyAllocator
Go to MyAllocator.com and open and account. Then open your Bellebnb Front Desk and go to 'Settings > Channel Manager > Integrations' and click 'Connect MyAllocator' then follow the instructions to connect your Bellebnb Front Desk to MyAllocator.
Step III: Initial Connections to Your OTA Channels
When you connect your rooms to MyAllocator and select ‘Publish Availability’ only the number of available rooms for each room type is published (i.e., availability). Prices are not published at this stage.
To publish prices for your rooms, you have to go to ‘Settings > Channel Manager > MyAllocator > Set Pricing’ in your Bellebnb Front Desk. Here you can set room prices per room and per channel. You can use the buttons that appear above each price field (click any date’s price field) to make this task easier by copying the price over for the week, day of week, or the entire month.
Before you do this, you should connect your rooms from MyAllocator to each channel you use. So, connect MyAllocator to Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, etc. Once you have done that, then you should publish prices, so you can be sure your prices are published to every channel. This is why we make this a separate step.
Summary
The steps to setup your channel connections are as follows:
- Setup your rooms on Bellebnb.
- Publish your rooms from Bellebnb to MyAllocator (remember to check ‘publish availability’).
- Connect your rooms on MyAllocator to Booking.com, Expedia, etc.
- Publish room prices from Bellebnb to every channel (see above).
When you publish prices from Bellebnb (as above), you can choose ‘Bulk Update’ to publish prices to a set of channels if you would like all those channels to have the same prices. This can help speed things up.
Once you have connected Bellebnb to MyAllocator and MyAllocator to all of your channels, you don’t need to use MyAllocator again. Everything is managed from your Bellebnb Front Desk. You just need to make the initial connections, and then you don’t need to think about it again.
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