A channel manager distributes rates and inventory to every OTA simultaneously, ingests bookings from each OTA into your PMS, and decrements availability across all channels in real time when a booking arrives anywhere.
Without a channel manager, manual rate updates inevitably produce parity violations (different OTAs showing different prices) and oversells (two bookings on different OTAs for the last room). With the right one, both problems disappear.
Common players for India: eZee Centrix, STAAH, SiteMinder, RateGain. Native PMS-bundled channel managers (e.g. Cloudbeds) work but are usually less feature-complete than dedicated tools.
See our 2026 channel manager comparison for selection criteria.