If availability lives in two places, one of them is wrong. Usually you find out from a guest.
Almost every independent hotel runs the same arrangement: a PMS bought off a shelf, a channel manager bought from somebody else, and a connector between them that works most of the time. It is presented as best-of-breed. In practice it means availability exists in two places, and on any given evening one of them is out of date.
The failure is never dramatic. A rate change is entered at four and propagates at seven. A cancellation releases a room that three channels do not learn about until the next sync. Somebody keeps a spreadsheet, quietly, because neither system tells the whole truth — and that spreadsheet is the real reservation system, held by one person who is on holiday in August.
The alternative is not a better connector. It is refusing the premise that these are two products. When inventory lives once, inside the system that also runs the front desk, the channel manager stops being software you log into and becomes a view of data you already trust. Updates go out in seconds because there is nothing to reconcile; reservations come back into the same record because there is nowhere else for them to go.
This is not a technical preference. It is the difference between a manager who spends the first hour of the day checking that yesterday was right, and one who spends it deciding what today should cost.
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Four steps is the whole booking engine