Please be particularly vigilant about updating your availability and pricing well in advance, particularly over holiday periods. Remember that maintaining pricing and availability and correctly feeding it into the Channel Manager is your responsibility as the property owner or hotelier.

You also need to ensure that your PMS interface is up and running at all times to allow proper communication between the PMS and the Channel Manager. This is essential for updating rates and inventory, as well as the automatic delivery of reservation details into your PMS.

Depending on what type of integration you have, you will need to handle your inventory differently (see below sections).

A two-way integration means that your PMS should receive reservations from the Channel Manager, and your PMS will send rates, availability and restrictions to The Channel Manager including: Stop Sell, Minimum Stay, Maximum Stay, CTA and CTD.

Most PMSs only update Stop Sell and Minimum Stay and some do not support restriction updates at all. Other systems, such as Rate Management Systems (RMSs), do not support updating availability and/or rates — for example, an RMS does not update availability. Check directly with your PMS or system provider which restrictions are sent.

The Channel Manager interface always allows you to make changes, however if the PMS is sending a certain type of value to the Channel Manager, you should not make changes on the Channel Manager extranet directly as these will be overwritten by the PMS. You can use the Channel Manager extranet only to compare these values with what you have in your PMS.

Any value that the PMS does not send to the Channel Manager, you can instead change directly from the Channel Manager extranet. For example if you have been reassured by the support team of your PMS that they cannot send Maximum Stay to the Channel Manager, you can update the Maximum Stay directly from the Channel Manager extranet.

When you are initially integrating the PMS with the Channel Manager, you can also request the PMS to purposefully avoid sending certain values that it can send. This is often called a "partial" integration.

The Channel Manager has the ability of the flexibility to apply restrictions per connected channel, however many PMSs cannot send the restriction values ‘per channel’, in which case, when a restriction is sent, it applies to all channels indiscriminately. Instead, you could request the PMS to not send any restriction values to the Channel Manager, so that you can manually control them directly from the Channel Manager.

A one-way integration means that your PMS will receive reservations from Channel Manager, but it will not send availability, rates, stop sells, minimum stays, maximum stays, CTA and CTD to the Channel Manager. In which case you should continue to make changes directly on the Channel Manager extranet.

One-way integration can also be used to describe the opposite kind of connection (extremely rare and very impractical), in which the Channel Manager does not send reservations to the PMS, but it will still receive availability, rates and restrictions from the PMS. In this case, most of the considerations explained in the section above for two-way integrations can be applied.

Once the connection is active, reservations flow from the channels to the Channel Manager, then from the Channel Manager to the PMS. If you create a reservation directly in your PMS, it will not be communicated to the Channel Manager, but the inventory should be updated accordingly.

Reservations should normally be sent to your PMS as long as the mapping for your room rates is correct both for "Channel Manager to PMS" and "Channel Manager to channel".

Even without a PMS, if you receive a reservation for a room rate that was not mapped to the channel, the Channel Manager will be unable to adjust the availability for the corresponding room, so users with the option to receive email notifications will receive a message that says "Failed to adjust inventory for (reservation number)". When you are connected to a PMS, in this scenario, the reservation will also be unable to reach the PMS.

If you receive a reservation for a room rate that was not mapped to the PMS, it will be unable to reach the PMS.

Once the connection is active, modifications and cancellations flow from the channels to the Channel Manager, then from the Channel Manager to the PMS. If you modify or cancel a reservation directly in your PMS, this change will not be communicated to the Channel Manager, and therefore it cannot be communicated to the channel either. All modifications and cancellations of reservations should be done directly in the channel of origin, so that the correct taxes and commission can be applied.

If your property is just starting with the Channel Manager and is also connected to a PMS, there will be no issue with the communication of modifications and cancellations from the Channel Manager to the PMS.

If your property was live with the Channel Manager for some time and is now connecting to a PMS (or if you are changing to a new PMS integration), then your modifications and cancellations might incur in some issues when flowing from Channel Manager to the PMS.

Consult with your PMS's support team and check if the PMS has a way of importing all previously created reservations. This is normally done by downloading the CSV of the reservation summary report from the Reservation section in Channel Manager. Channel Manager provides reservations to the PMS with a 3 letter code that indicates the channel that the reservation came from. Some PMSs have a way to associate this code to a channel by filling in a setting on their interface for "Reservation External Number ID" or "CRS External Reservation Numbers" (or other names depending on the PMS).

If your PMS has no way of importing all reservations created prior to the integration, or if they don't have a way to track the channel code of the reservation, then all your modifications and cancellations for reservations that were created prior to the integration to the PMS will fail to reach the PMS. Fortunately, this problem is only temporary as the old reservations will eventually be all checked out.

Please be advised that reservation emails may come by email from your Channel Manager for some of your channels.

Where provided, the customer's credit card CVC/CVV 3 digit security number will be at the bottom of this email. If your PMS is able to retrieve Credit Card data from reservations provided by the Channel Manager, you can find the remaining Credit Card details in your PMS's interface. Either way, the remaining Credit Card Details can also be found within the Reservations section of your Channel Manager. This information will remain in your Channel Manager for 7 days after the reservation check-out date.

You can sync your Siteminder Pay transaction details, such as your payments and refunds associated with a channel reservation, to participating property management systems (PMS). To find out if you are using a participating PMS, please contact them directly.

Please be aware your Channel Manager will not override any contracted allocation you have agreed with any of your Online Travel Agents (OTA). Your Channel Manager will send the availability from your Inventory Grid. This does not override the contracted allocation on the OTA extranets.

Orange rates in the Inventory Grid send the instruction to Stop Sell the rate on the OTA extranet. It will not be possible for your Channel Manager to Stop Sell your rates where contracted allocation has not been met.

The agreement is between the hotel and the OTA and therefore your Channel Manager does not keep record of whether your contracted allocation has been met. Please speak to your OTA account manager if you would like to discuss your contracted allocation with them.