This is the final step of setting up an online travel agency in Mews Channel Manager. Enabling the channel is what takes it live. Once you enable it, your rates, availability, and restrictions start flowing to the agency, and bookings start arriving in Mews. Before you enable, Mews asks you to confirm that your listing is ready for guests to see.

 

This article explains what to check before you enable, how to enable the channel, and what to look for immediately afterwards to confirm everything is working.

 

In this article, you can learn about:

• Before you enable

• Confirming your listing is ready

• Enabling the channel

• What happens after you enable

• Verifying the channel is live

• What to do next

 

Before you enable

Before you enable a channel, you should have already:

• Completed Steps 1 to 4 of the setup: credentials, connectivity partner, channel settings, and room rate mapping.

• Uploaded photos of your rooms on the agency extranet.

• Written complete descriptions of your rooms and property on the agency extranet.

• Reviewed your rates, restrictions, and availability in Mews, so what you send to the agency reflects how you want to sell.

 

Missing photos or incomplete descriptions can lead to poor ratings on the agency once bookings start arriving, and those ratings are hard to recover from.

 

Confirming your listing is ready

When you reach the enable step, Mews asks you to confirm that you have added proper photos and descriptions on the agency extranet. This is a checkbox or acknowledgement you tick before you can enable the channel.

 

The check is there to protect your channel ratings. If you enable a channel with missing content, your listing goes live in a poor state, and any guests who book from it may leave low ratings that stay on the channel long after you fix the content.

 

Enabling the channel

To enable a channel:

1. In Mews, in the side navigation menu, click Revenue > Tools > Channels, and select the channel you have set up.

2. Move to Step 5, the enable step.

3. Confirm the acknowledgement that your photos and descriptions are ready on the agency extranet.

4. Select Enable.

 

Mews changes the channel status to indicate the channel is now live and starts sending rates, availability, and restrictions to the agency.

 

What happens after you enable

Once you enable the channel:

• The channel status changes to Syncing on the Channels screen.

• Mews starts sending your rates, availability, and restrictions to the agency.

• Bookings from the agency start arriving in Mews as reservations.

• The channel appears on the Channel status widget on the Revenue overview.

• Once the channel has been selling for a few days, its performance appears in the Channel Performance dashboard.

 

Verifying the channel is live

Right after enabling, spend a few minutes confirming the channel is behaving as you expected. Check:

• Channel status: on the Revenue overview, the Channel status widget shows the channel as Synced once the first sync completes. See Monitoring channel status in Mews Channel Manager.

• The agency listing: open the agency extranet, or your listing on the agency's public site, and check that your rates and availability appear as expected.

• Rate accuracy: if you have set a rate modification factor, spot-check that the rates on the agency reflect the factor. See Using the rate modification factor in Mews Channel Manager.

• Room mapping: when the first bookings arrive, confirm they land on the correct rooms and rates in Mews.

 

If anything looks wrong, do not disable the channel straight away. Most issues resolve within an hour as the first sync completes and the agency processes the incoming rates. If a problem persists, check the channel audit log for what has been sent. 

 

What to do next

Once your channel is live:

1. Monitor its sync status on the Revenue overview. See Monitoring channel status in Mews Channel Manager.

2. Once bookings start arriving, review its performance in the Channel Performance dashboard.

3. If you need to change any settings later, return to the channel on the Channels screen. See How to configure channel settings in Mews Channel Manager.

4. If you need to stop the channel selling for a period, or disconnect it altogether, see How to disable or disconnect a channel in Mews Channel Manager.

 

With the channel enabled and verified as working, your rates and availability sync to it automatically, bookings flow back into Mews, and you can focus on the strategy of selling through it rather than the mechanics.