Xotelia

My experience of Xotelia has been anything but positive overall. There are a few things that I wasn't happy with but you will find pros and cons to every channel manager etc
The price for the amount/type of rooms you have can go up. So it is preferable for those with less or fewer types of rooms. But is still a milestone cheaper than any of the competitor such as free to book, my allocator or eviio. This is mainly because Xotelia doesn't charge commission on bookings. So you can save a lot, if you get most of your bookings on OTAs.

The customer service is fantastic. My account manager Sorin was nothing but amazing. Super helpful and he really knows what he's doing. Rarely did I have a problem that he couldn't find the solution to. However, there were times that I had to pressure or spam him to get things done. There were days where he couldn't get back to me until the evening, and others where he would be with me the whole day, and I could get a lot done. But this is understandable, Xotelia is a growing company so the staff can sometimes have too much on their plate. And as we were just starting off there was a lot more to do. We also had an issue where my account manager put in the wrong codes for the rooms, which led to a few over bookings. But this was quickly and urgently dealt with.

Another thing to note is that although the xotelia admin dashboard is great. You do need to spend the time to learn and get used to it. Your account manager will not do everything for you, or spoon feed you. I had to put in room codes, fill in descriptions etc. This is great at the same time because it helps you to understand the xotelia admin dashboard better.

A few other nitpicks. Xotelia does not support some OTAs such as Priceline, kayak. However, there is a huge variety, including a two-way connection with Airbnb which I don't think any other channel manager offers.

I was also upset that Xotelia didn't offer the automated email Trip review service for trip advisor reviews. Which their competitors free to book, and myallocator do. I contacted both xotelia and TripAdvisor regarding this matter. And got a 'no' from both.

Please note that these are all issues that I have faced personally, and take nothing away from what a fantastic service this really is. The best in the market, and I will definitely be continuing to use this as my B&B progresses.

I was looking for a channel manager solution for one of my friend who runs a small hotel which has 4 different rooms. We were getting bookings from Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda, Expedia and having troubles to update each and every calendar manually. Especially during the high season.

I was looking for the cheapest channel manager and the Xotelia was the one. They don't have many features but definitely, cater our requirement. Initially, setup was bit painful because we had to enter all existing bookings into an excel file and then upload. Most of other channel managers like SabeeApp.com had cool features like importing all existing bookings automatically so that we don't have to do a thing.

But anyway once this painful setup is over, everything works as expected. We were having some troubles when sending rates and availability to Airbnb channel. Then found out Airbnb has some high restrictions, so due to that reason Xotelia was so buggy. But it is resolved now.

Now my friend who runs the hotel receive an email every morning, which room is free today, to which room guests are going to arrive today and their phone no etc.... We don't use a PMS, but this channel manager works like a one.

When it comes to Customer Support, I think they are having very few number of people so, if you make a skype chat you will probably get a reply on next date. The email support also takes time unless you bug them all the time like I do.

We can forget that delay in customer support because we hardly have to use them after the initial integration. The only drawback I see in this system is this is not mobile friendly. Since this is a web-based system, this doesn't display nicely on your iPhone (I double in iPad as well). You have to have a laptop with you if you are doing changes every time. But that also ok, because we get a mobile friendly email every morning that does the job.

I used it because it was the platform available to me through BBCanada. If I remember correctly the yearly fee was quite low (perhaps a discount through BB Canada?) Once BBCanada was working on launching their own platform I began looking for another channel manager.

I used this Software for a year. It is a good product if you have a small Hotel. They don't offer PSM, only channel manager. It is easy to use, but they created a Beta version for bookings and I started to get overbookings. I try to contact technical supper several times, and they answered me like one month later. I had to be very careful with the Beta version, because of that. After one year contract, I decided to try another product, with better costomer service. And with PSM to make my life easier.

I began looking for a channel manager about 2 years ago. I was advertising my 2 holiday rental apartments on 2 websites and was looking for more exposure. I had already experienced the dreaded "double booking" an unpleasant and sometimes rather expensive situation, which I was determined should never happen again, a more professional approach was required.