Distribution Engine vs. Direct Connect: What’s the Difference?

In order to present appropriate rents and fees to guests, you create a derivative rate that includes both a markup and a booking fee, and attribute that rent to a revenue account. These are difficult to figure out across channels, especially when dealing with length of stays, discounts, and more.

Now, embedded fee setup means that fees and commissions will calculate correctly and get sent to the channels. Our markup calculator for Vrbo, Airbnb, and MHVB takes the guesswork out of rates, taxes, or commission pass-thrus. Once set up, Track calculates the rent and fees and sends the appropriate information back to your ledger accounts.

This feature also allows you to incorporate seasonal fees the channels don’t take and add fees channels won’t allow you to add (e.g. Airbnb will not take a $ per day fee, but you can now do this with embedded fees).

Only after creating derivative rates for different lengths of stays can you add them to your Airbnb console.

Promotions and discounts are created for weekly, monthly, and early bird specials based on the length-of-stay pricing model. That same model presents the correct pricing for you.

Instead of logging into Airbnb to manage these and enabling unit by unit, DE makes it simple.

Channels are constantly updating and adding amenities, so it is difficult to know when channels add them, what they are, and how to ensure the correct “name” of an amenity matches its channel equivalent, e.g. “jacuzzi” vs. “hot tub” vs. “spa.”

DE automatically syncs new amenities, flags those that are unmapped, and pushes the amenities appropriately to each channel no matter what they’re called.

You must log in to each unit on each channel to manage content updates like headlines, descriptions, and risk errors. Big time commitment logistically.

Now, it’s simple to update all content across units and across channels with automatic content checks and headlines. Easily update units seasonally or around events as needed.

Manually copy and paste or upload information for each unit on each channel.

Simply search and identify properties, select and bulk change, update and upload content across all channels with just a couple of clicks. A huge time-saver.

A validation report gets run for you each night and presents unit validation messages for errors and warnings that need to be addressed.

Warnings and errors show up in the channel dashboard automatically and also link straight to the page to address the errors. You can sort and filter messages to prioritize them.