Connectivity provider

A company certified by an OTA to exchange data with it on a property's behalf. Channel managers and property management systems are the usual examples.

When you connect your PMS to Booking.com, Expedia or Airbnb, you are not talking to the channel directly. Your PMS is acting as a connectivity provider, sending rates, availability and restrictions out, and pulling reservations back in.

The certification matters in practice. Channels decide which data fields a connectivity provider is allowed to receive, and they can change that list. In September 2026 Booking.com stopped passing guest phone numbers to all connectivity providers worldwide, which meant every connected property lost that field at once regardless of which PMS it used.

Properties working directly in a channel's own extranet are not connectivity partners and are not affected by those decisions in the same way.