Webhook

A webhook is a way for one system to tell another that something just happened, without being asked.

Most integrations work the other way round. Your channel manager or accounting tool polls the PMS: every few minutes it asks "anything new?" and the PMS answers. That is wasteful when nothing has changed, and slow when something has.

With a webhook, you give the PMS a URL and it pushes a small message to that address the moment an event occurs: a booking is created, a rate changes, a guest checks out. The receiving system reacts immediately.

Why it matters when choosing a PMS

Webhook support is one of the clearest dividing lines between a modern API and an old one, which is why API scoring studies treat "webhook maturity" as its own measure. Practically, it decides three things for you:

• How fast your other tools know. Polling integrations can lag by minutes. A dynamic pricing tool or a smart lock that has to wait for the next poll is working on stale data.
• How many events you can subscribe to. A PMS that fires webhooks only for new reservations is far less useful than one that also covers cancellations, modifications, payments and housekeeping status.
• Whether failures are visible. Good webhook implementations retry a failed delivery and let you see the log. Poor ones drop the message silently, which is how a cancellation quietly fails to reach your channel manager.

What to ask a vendor

Ask which events fire webhooks, whether deliveries are retried and for how long, and whether you can inspect delivery logs yourself. If the answer is that your integrator should just poll the API, expect lag and build around it.