Glossary · Travel distribution
Channel manager
A channel manager is software that connects a hotel's property management or reservation system to its distribution channels — OTAs, GDS connections, metasearch and its own booking engine — pushing availability, rates and restrictions to all of them from one place and passing reservations back.
Reviewed 30 Oct 2026
What a channel manager sends
The data is known as ARI: availability, rates and inventory. Many connections use message formats from the OpenTravel Alliance; Google's hotel price feed documentation, for example, uses these three:
| Message | Carries |
|---|---|
OTA_HotelAvailNotifRQ | Availability and restrictions per room type and rate plan |
OTA_HotelRateAmountNotifRQ | Rate amounts by occupancy, per room type and rate plan, over date ranges |
OTA_HotelInvCountNotifRQ | How many rooms of each type are available to sell |
Updates are pushed when something changes, rather than polled by the channel.
Where it sits among hotel systems
- Property management system (PMS): reservations, rooms and guests on the property.
- [Revenue management system](/glossary/revenue-management-system/): decides the prices and restrictions.
- Channel manager: distributes those decisions to each channel and collects the bookings.
- Booking engine: the hotel's own website checkout, usually one channel among the others.
Why channels still disagree
A channel manager makes consistent prices possible, not certain. Rate plans mapped wrongly to a channel, channel-specific markups or discounts, an OTA funding a promotion from its own commission, currency conversion and update delays all produce different public prices for the same room. That is what rate parity monitoring catches, by checking the displayed result channel by channel — see hotel rate parity monitoring.
FAQ
Questions
Something not covered? Write to contact@arcproxies.io.
Is a channel manager the same as a PMS?
No. The PMS runs operations at the property: reservations, rooms and guest records. The channel manager connects that inventory to outside sales channels. Some vendors sell both in one product.
Does a channel manager set hotel prices?
No. Prices come from the revenue manager or a revenue management system; the channel manager distributes them, with any channel-specific rules the hotel has configured.
What does ARI stand for in hotel distribution?
Availability, rates and inventory: which rooms can be sold, at what prices and with which restrictions, for each date.
Why does a sold-out room still appear on an OTA?
Usually because an update has not yet reached or been processed by that channel, or because the room is mapped to a rate plan that was not closed. The booking is then rejected or has to be reallocated by the hotel.
Sources & review
Last reviewed by the ARC Proxies team. Prices are read from the live catalog at build time.
- [1]Google for Developers: Hotel Prices: ARI Overview
In practice