Managing reservations and staying on top of advertising your vacation rental can be overwhelming and time-consuming—that is, unless you use a channel manager to optimize your business. Wix, one of the best website builders for vacation rentals, recognized hosts’ and managers’ need for a channel manager tool, and that’s how Wix Hotels came into existence.
While there’s no debate about Wix excelling as a website builder with its easy setup, customization, and integration with other vacation rental software, the Wix Hotels channel manager, on the other hand, has quite a controversial reputation.
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View spreadsheetIs the Wix channel manager as good as the Wix website builder? You can find out in our in-depth review as we talk through its features, price, and limitations.
How Does Wix Hotels Channel Manager Work?
Wix works with HotelRunner to provide hosts with a channel manager integration called Wix Hotels. Wix Hotels is an app that can be added to any Wix website. In fact, it is already included in some of Wix’s rental-specific templates.
You can connect the Wix channel manager to over 150 vacation rental services, including Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, Orbitz, and more. The app allows you to manage bookings, accept payments, update reservations and rates, and keep an eye on all your bookings from all channels in your Wix Hotel calendar.
Setting up the Wix channel manager is a no-brainer given that Wix has an extensive Help Center with numerous useful articles—such as a checklist explaining how to connect Wix Hotels to the channel manager and a step-by-step guide on how to connect your property to booking channels.
The cost of the channel manager service comes at a flat fee of $15 per month. Wix doesn’t charge any commission per booking. If you want to test it out for free, you can take advantage of the 14-day free trial. If you decide you want to continue using Wix, you have the option to upgrade to a Premium Plan.
What Does the Wix Channel Manager Do?
Wix Hotels offers a lot of features that you can also find in other popular channel managers. Here’s a run-down of what can you use the Wix channel manager for:
- Integration with Other Booking Systems and Calendars – This gives you a holistic view of reservations across channels and helps you avoid double bookings.
- Calendar Synchronization – You can sync the calendar with channels that use iCal (such as Airbnb). Bear in mind that iCal connections have only one-way synchronization—from your Wix Hotels Reservation Calendar to the channel.
- Changing Room Details – Add details about different rooms available for booking from the channel manager.
- Adjusting Rates – The Wix app makes it easy to change rates according to seasons, holidays, events, and other peak periods, rather than having to manually update them on every vacation rental platform.
- Translating Booking Descriptions – Display your booking information in up to 14 languages to attract international guests.
- Automating Booking Confirmations – Save time by sending automated confirmation emails when guests make a reservation.
Drawbacks of the Wix Channel Manager
Wix is a great website builder with its wide selection of templates specifically designed for vacation rentals, hotels, and B&Bs, so you would expect that its channel manager would maintain the same level of excellence—but that’s not the case.
Wix’s channel manager is still in beta which means that it is still new and in an experimental phase. Beta apps tend to have bugs and glitches and are less stable than most apps.
So, if you’ll be using Wix Hotels as your channel manager, be prepared for issues. Even Wix admits that the channel manager feature “can be complicated to sync and set up” and that sync issues sometimes occur.
While the translation feature does sound great in theory, Wix relies on Google Translate for the translations, so you might end up with awkward descriptions and potential miscommunication.
Users have also complained about wrong prices being shown, opening up booked nights, reservations made in Wix not displaying, and poor customer service. Wix hotels can also cause problems with your website, so be sure to back up your rental’s site before you start making changes.
Should You Use Wix Channel Manager?
At first look, the Wix Hotels channel manager does seem to offer all you need from this type of tool, but after you consider the bugs, glitches, and bad reviews, we wouldn’t recommend using it (at least until they get it to work properly).
You can, of course, take Wix up on that free trial to see how it all works, but be prepared for problems, and remember to back up your website first.
However, don’t let the limitations of the Wix channel manager scare you away from giving using the Wix website builder. We did a detailed overview of the Wix website builder in our Wix vs Lodgify comparison, so you can learn more about it there. Wix and Lodgify can even work together as you can embed a Lodgify booking widget or search form on your external Wix website.
If you want to check out alternatives to the Wix channel manager, we’ve ranked our favorite channel managers here. We also have an article that covers the best free channel managers as well as tools that offer a longer free trial with no strings attached.
Final Thoughts
While the Wix website builder offers a plethora of amazing features for rental owners, its channel manager leaves much to be desired. We must admit that we aren’t impressed with how it works, and frequent complaints about bugs and glitches aren’t something you can easily overlook.
Since the point of a channel manager is to make your life as a host easier, more streamlined, and less worrisome, we would recommend that you opt for one of many channel managers that don’t come with a list of anticipated problems.
