For a long time, rate parity was the rule. If you were listed on Booking.com or Expedia, the terms of those contracts required you to match - or not beat - their rates on your own website. Offering a lower price direct was a contract violation. The platforms enforced it, sometimes aggressively.
That’s changed. Regulatory pressure across Europe and the UK challenged the legality of narrow rate parity clauses, and the major OTAs have largely backed away from enforcing them.
Most properties think about guest experience as something that starts at check-in. The room, the welcome, the service - that’s where the experience happens, and that’s where the attention goes. The period between booking confirmation and arrival is treated as dead time. A waiting room.
That’s a missed opportunity. In my experience, the properties that handle pre-arrival communication well create a meaningfully better guest experience - and they do it before the guest has even walked through the door.
A channel manager is one of those pieces of software that should be invisible when it’s working well and absolutely miserable when it isn’t. It sits in the middle of your distribution setup - between your property and all the platforms you’re listed on - and keeps availability, rates, and restrictions in sync. When it works, you update your calendar once and the changes flow everywhere. When it doesn’t, you get double bookings, stale rates, and a support queue.
When Airbnb introduced Smart Pricing, they sold it as a tool that would take the complexity of pricing off your plate. Set a minimum, set a maximum, let the algorithm handle the rest. For hosts who found pricing confusing or time-consuming, it sounded like a solution.
It’s not a bad tool. But there’s a gap between what it does and what most hosts assume it does, and that gap costs money.
If I had to pick one thing that independent hotels get wrong more consistently than anything else, it’s this: they spend time and money making their website look good, and then they plug in a booking engine that undoes all of it at the last moment.
I understand why it happens. Website design is visible and tangible. You can look at it, show it to people, feel proud of it. A booking engine is more of a back-office decision - something you evaluate against a list of features, maybe demo a couple of options, and then move on.