Glossary

What is ARI?

ARI stands for Availability, Rates, and Inventory — data your PMS exchanges with each connected booking channel through a channel manager. When someone asks if ARI is synced, they mean whether the connected channels have the intended room availability and prices.

The three components

Availability

How many sellable rooms or units are available for each date. For example, a room type with five rooms and two confirmed stays may have three rooms left to sell.

Bookings, cancellations, and manual blocks can change availability. The PMS recalculates it from its reservations and inventory; channel updates still take time to reach and appear on each OTA.

Rates

What you charge per night for each room type on each date — and often varied by length of stay or guest segment. Your "Deluxe King" might cost $180/night on a Tuesday, $240/night on a Friday, and $400/night on New Year's Eve.

Rates can also be derived: a rate plan might say "Deluxe King non-refundable is the standard rate × 0.85." Or "weekly stays get 10% off." The channel manager pushes the calculated final rate for each date, not the formula.

Inventory

Inventory can mean the room types and their sellable capacity, or just the number of rooms left. What room details a channel accepts depends on the channel connection and mapping.

In channel-management discussions, people sometimes use "inventory" to mean the available room count. Ask whether they mean room types, total capacity, or availability for particular dates.

Why operators care about ARI sync

Because if ARI doesn't sync, bad things happen:

Overbooking risk — If two bookings arrive before a channel update reaches another site, both may accept the last room. A channel manager reduces manual calendar work but cannot remove every delay across systems.
Lost revenue — A rate update reaches one channel before another, so guests may briefly see different prices while the updates propagate.
Manual fixes everywhere — Without automated ARI sync, the alternative is opening each OTA's extranet, updating the calendar manually, hoping you didn't miss one. Hours per week, error-prone.

How fast should ARI sync?

There is no single delivery time that applies to every connection. A channel manager may queue rate and availability updates; booking notifications may arrive by webhook or polling. The channel can also take extra time to display a change to guests. Ask for the typical timing and supported fields for the specific connection.

For Vortex PMS, availability and rate updates typically reach the channel in under five minutes. Booking webhooks usually arrive in about two minutes; channels without webhooks are checked every 15 minutes. The OTA may take additional time to show changes. These are typical timings, not a guarantee against overbooking.