Difference between Property Management Systems and Channel Managers

If you are reading this, it is very likely that you don’t know the difference between a PMS (Property Management System) and a CM (Channel Manager), or that you are confused about the meaning of these terminologies within the property rental industry (STR) and the hotel industry. If so, you are in the right place!

Let’s start with the basics:

What is a Property Management System?

A Property Management System (PMS) is a software that makes administrative tasks related to reservations (such as calendar management, rate scheduling, sending messages, etc.) easier by unifying them in one place. Do you want to go into more detail? Read our post “What do the acronyms PMS stand for?”

Online Travel Agencies

Now then. PMSs alone allow Property Managers to manage everything related to their published accommodations on their official website, i.e. on their own site, not on an Online Travel Agency (OTA) such as Airbnb or Booking.com.

An OTA, which in Spanish is known as “agencia de viajes en línea”, is the platform where Property Owners and Property Managers publish their apartments in the form of listings, since the growth and good reputation of OTAs lead guests to look for properties there. Do you want to know more? Visit our post “What is an OTA?”

What are Channel Managers (CM)?

In order not to have to manage each OTA separately, and to have unified all the functions that have been performed in the PMS, we need to link all the agencies together with the PMS. And this is where Channel Managers come into play.

Thanks to them, we can automatically update prices, reservations and availability in several travel agencies at the same time. In this way, the calendar is easily and effectively managed: By connecting PMSs to OTAs, the possibility of overbooking, i.e. duplicate bookings, is eliminated. Take a look at our post “What are Channel Managers”.

Then…

What is the difference between a PMS and a CM?

Property Management Systems are software that makes it easier to manage tasks, such as sending messages, managing the calendar and updating revenue, by unifying them in one place.
Channel Managers are software that allows all the information stored and managed by the PMS to be shared with Online Travel Agencies, thus avoiding having to update prices and the calendar manually OTA by OTA or check for overbookings, which over time becomes a tedious task.