Hotel technology is the software a hotel uses to sell its rooms, take bookings, check guests in and out, and bring them back. A single hotel sells the same room on its own website, on dozens of travel sites, and to companies at agreed rates. Each of these places is called a channel. The price of the room changes every day, and sometimes several times a day.
This creates the hotel's hardest problem. Say two people book the hotel's last room at the same moment on two different travel sites. If the sites are not kept in step, the hotel has sold one room twice. Keeping one stock of rooms correct on many sites at once is the problem described in multichannel inventory management.
Consider your own booking. You want a sea-facing room at a beach hotel in Goa for a long weekend in December. The hotel runs five systems, and you meet each of them.
The revenue management system (RMS) has already set the price for each night, from forecasts of how many people will want the room. December weekends in Goa are nearly full, so the price is high. Changing prices with demand in this way is dynamic pricing.
The channel manager sends that price, and the number of rooms still free, to every online travel agency (OTA) at once. You compare the price on two travel sites, and then find the room slightly cheaper on the hotel's own website. You book there, through the hotel booking engine. The hotel prefers this booking, because it pays no commission to a travel site. The channel manager then reduces the free rooms by one on every site.
The booking is stored in the property management system (PMS), the hotel's main system. It holds every room, every booking, check-in and check-out, and each guest's bill. It is the hotel's system of record, the one database that the hotel treats as the official version of its bookings. When you arrive, the front desk checks you in on the PMS. Your restaurant bills are added to your room's bill, and you pay once at check-out.
After you leave, the hotel guest CRM keeps the record of your stay. A few months later, it sends you an offer for your next visit. This record is first-party data: data that the hotel collected itself.
Many small hotels in India do not buy these systems one by one. A family-owned hotel can instead join a hotel franchise chain. The chain brings the hotel up to its standards, runs it on the chain's software and sells its rooms. Several Indian budget hotel chains are built this way, on software more than on buildings.