Hi hosts, I’m an engineer and I’m thinking about creating a channel manager tool/app and making it for free to all hosts (seriously, just want to contribute to the community). What functionality would you like to see in it?
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Instant booking showing across all platforms!
3 Likes
Good intention, but for hosts, bad idea.
Being “free” means you, the developer, have no accountability to users. This means bug fixes, security patches, updates etc may or may not be implemented as you have no financial incentive to provide a stable and secure product.
Many hosts are actually running a business, and the risks involved (double bookings, loss of data etc) by using your free product when it’s likely to still be in a testing/development stage are not ones any sensible host would want to take.
In my opinion, you’re actually fishing for potential user feedback towards a product you, or your company, intend to develop and market.
JF
5 Likes
Why do you want to contribute to the STR community?
look at Owner Rez and you will see what a successful and good channel mgr does.
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To me the reliability of calendar syncing is critical and often does not work well (in particular, but not only, with Bookings.com).
Some platforms require payment to be dealt with with the channel manager if you use one: clearly, that would be a big need.
My suggestion on this would be to make it free, but to offer for-pay support, like it often happens in the opensource community. For me, a channel manager is a critical piece of infrastructure, so being able to get support for it would be great.
I am a fairly recent host, so I am sure many others can provide much more valuable feedback.
do you mean from new channel managers, or from new properties going through established channel managers? If you have Owner Rez you can still api to AirBnb
