Channel Manager overview

If you sell rooms on Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, or any OTA, the channel manager is the layer that keeps your rates and availability identical everywhere — and that pulls each booking back to HotelBee so the front desk only watches one calendar. Without it, you'd be updating prices in five places and racing the clock to avoid double-bookings.

How it fits together

There are three layers:

• HotelBee — the source of truth for room types, rate plans, prices, and the live booking calendar.
• Channel manager — the middleware that talks the OTA-specific dialects so HotelBee doesn't have to. HotelBee uses Channex by default, with Beds24, HotelRunner, Webhotelier, and Exely as alternatives.
• OTAs — Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, Hotelbeds, and the rest. Each connects to the channel manager once, then receives every rate update from HotelBee through it.

Why Channex is the default

When you open Channel Manager, Bookings, Rooms, or Properties in HotelBee, you're looking at Channex's UI embedded inside the back office. Channex was chosen because:

• 200+ OTAs supported (the long tail matters when you sell on regional channels like Trip.com or Hotelbeds).
• Two-way API: rates push out, bookings come in, modifications and cancellations propagate both ways.
• Per-room-type and per-rate-plan mapping so promo plans, non-refundable rates, and seasonal plans push correctly to each OTA.
• Native support for restrictions: minimum stay, maximum stay, closed-to-arrival, closed-to-departure, stop-sell.
• Multi-property: one HotelBee account can connect multiple Channex "properties" (each building or brand).

Other supported channel managers

Properties already running on a different channel manager don't have to switch:

• Beds24 — first-class support; widely used by smaller European hotels. A Beds24 → Channex migration tool is built in (Settings → Integrations → Beds24 Migration) for properties that want to move.
• HotelRunner — common in Turkey, the Balkans, and the Middle East.
• Webhotelier — popular in Greece and Cyprus.
• Exely — a full-stack hotel-tech vendor; HotelBee speaks Exely's channel API alongside its booking engine.

What gets synced

• Rates → OTAs — every Room Pricing update with the channel manager destination ticked. Rates push per room type per rate plan per date.
• Availability → OTAs — when a reservation is created, modified, cancelled, or moved between rooms, HotelBee tells the channel manager so the OTAs adjust their counts.
• Restrictions → OTAs — minimum stay, maximum stay, CTA/CTD, stop-sell flags ride along with the rate updates.
• Bookings → HotelBee — new OTA bookings land as reservations on the calendar, with the OTA name in the booking source field.
• Modifications and cancellations → HotelBee — if a guest changes or cancels on Booking.com, the change appears in HotelBee within a minute or two.
• Mapping changes ↔ both directions — when you create a new room type or rate plan in HotelBee, you can sync it to Channex with one click.

Prerequisites

Before connecting, make sure you have:

• Room types and rooms set up in HotelBee (Backoffice → Room Types and Rooms).
• At least one rate plan configured (Backoffice → Rates).
• A Channex account (or an existing Beds24 / HotelRunner / Webhotelier / Exely account).
• Each OTA you sell on registered with the channel manager.

Where the channel manager lives in HotelBee

• Settings → Integrations → Channel Managers — connect, disconnect, and configure the API credentials for Channex (or Beds24/HotelRunner/Webhotelier/Exely).
• Channel Manager → Channels — Channex's channel-management UI, embedded. Connect Booking.com, Airbnb, etc. here.
• Channel Manager → Bookings — every booking the channel manager has received, regardless of whether it landed cleanly in HotelBee. Useful for triaging mapping issues.
• Channel Manager → Properties — manage how your property appears to OTAs (address, photos, descriptions, contact).
• Channel Manager → Rooms — verify the room mapping between HotelBee and the channel manager.
• Backoffice → Rates Calendar — daily yield-management view: edit per-day prices and restrictions, save, push to all selected channels.

Next steps

Most properties start by connecting Channex (the most common path), then mapping room types, then registering Booking.com or Expedia inside Channex. From there, the daily flow is: take bookings, push prices when needed, watch OTA reservations come in. Each of those has its own article.