As well as doing the expected things like updating availability and pricing, we've tried to make the channel manager more user friendly, and much more forgiving of situations that are unexpected
Split date availability: Room 1 free Monday, Room 2 free Tuesday. An OTA booking for 2 nights no longer results in an "Unassigned Booking" and "exclusions" of rooms which then need to be removed.
Caterbook puts the booking in the free Rooms;
and warns you about the situation by email and via the dashboard.
You can then see if the existing bookings can be shuffled to accommodate this in one room for it's whole stay.
Unknown rateplan: If you add a new rate at the OTA but forget to map it against a Caterbook Rate plan, instead of creating exclusions the booking is imported to the calendar against the first mapped Rate plan and a warning is given via email and the dashboard.
Double booking: Sometimes bad things happen. It's rarely the technology at fault but Caterbook deals with this situation by importing the booking onto the Calendar and dropping it onto the built in Shuffle row. You get an email and a dashboard notification.
From there you can see whether you can assign the booking to a room by shuffling other bookings around. (The Shuffle row allows you to park multiple bookings on it!)
Unknown Room Type: As with the double booking example above, if you create a new Room on an OTA but don't map it against a Caterbook Room type, we don't know if we have any availability for it. In this scenario any bookings are also parked on the Shuffle row with a warning.