The Andronautic channel manager

The Andronautic channel manager is a tool that allows customers to connect their products and services with charter agencies and with experience, tour and activity agencies, as well as other online distribution channels (hereafter, external or remote systems), synchronizing availability from those platforms to Andronautic and vice versa. Being an automated process, it greatly mitigates the risk of duplicate or overlapping bookings.

The system accumulates changes in availability, prices or date restrictions (e.g., options or stop sales) and propagates these changes.

Requirements

To be able to use the Andronautic channel manager, the following requirements must be met:

• Be an Andronautic customer with one of the Channel manager modules contracted.
• Have an active account on the external system (GDS or OTA).
• Have configured the same price, sales and service conditions on both systems.

Charter channel manager

We can distinguish between global distribution systems (GDS) and charter online travel agencies (OTA).

Regarding GDSs, an agreement with them will be necessary, as well as having all boats loaded into the GDS. Afterwards, the boats can be mapped and Andronautic will keep the calendars synchronized.

Regarding charter OTAs, some make use of the Andronautic API to obtain all the information (boats, seasons, rates, discounts and availability), while others require the provider to manually create the boats in the agency, which can then be mapped (in some cases by the OTA and in others from Andronautic).

In general terms, any integration with an external system goes through the following steps:

1. Initial credential setup, so that Andronautic can synchronize data.
2. Initial boat mapping, so that the system knows the correspondence between the boats in Andronautic and the boats in the remote system.
3. Propagation of the occupancy marks created in the local system to the external system, in the format supported by the latter.

Some systems, which are technologically more advanced or more permissive, also support downloading bookings from the external system, which will be created in the local system.

Activity, tour and experience channel manager

The activity channel manager is considerably more advanced in the industry.

As for activities, most of the major OTAs require the provider to load all their experience data through their provider access with each of the OTAs. Once all this content has been loaded (this process is called “loading”), the corresponding mapping can be carried out between the experiences created in the OTA and the experiences existing in Andronautic.

On the other hand, there are smaller agencies where it is not necessary to have an agreement with them or to load the product into their systems, since they integrate everything needed directly through our API.