Webhook

Webhook is a push-based integration mechanism in which one system automatically sends an HTTP message to another system's URL the moment an event happens — instead of the receiving system repeatedly asking ("polling") whether anything has changed. In hotel distribution, webhooks are how modern OTAs, channel managers, PMSs, and booking engines notify each other of new reservations, modifications, cancellations, and rate or availability changes in near real time.

How it works

The receiving system registers an endpoint URL with the sender (e.g. a channel manager registers with an OTA's connectivity API). When an event fires — say a guest books a room — the sender immediately POSTs a payload like reservation.created with the booking details to that URL. The receiver acknowledges it and processes the update. Contrast this with pull-based polling, where the channel manager might fetch new bookings every few minutes regardless of whether any exist.

Example

A guest books on an OTA at 14:02:05. The OTA fires a reservation.created webhook to the hotel's channel manager at 14:02:06, which writes the booking to the PMS and pushes an availability decrement to all other channels by 14:02:10. Under five-minute polling, the same update could have taken until 14:07 — a window in which the last room could be sold twice.

Why it matters

Latency is the enemy of distribution: every second between a booking on one channel and the inventory update on all others is overbooking exposure, especially on compression nights when the last rooms sell fast. Webhooks cut that window from minutes to seconds, reduce API traffic (no empty polling calls), and enable event-driven workflows such as instant guest messaging, upsell triggers, and housekeeping task creation. When evaluating connectivity partners, hotels should ask whether reservation delivery and ARI updates are webhook/push-based or polled — it is one of the clearest technical quality signals for a channel manager or switch.

Related

See Channel Manager and Switch (Distribution Switch) for the systems that rely on webhooks, Overbooking for the risk they mitigate, and OpenTravel Alliance (OpenTravel) for the older message standards that push integrations increasingly replace.