eTourism Solutions presented by IMT-Students: SiteMinder

Allgemein

by Josue Steele Aizpurua & Ruihong Liu

Just like in a video game, SiteMinder has the best weapons available to slay your competitors and rescue your revenue while decreasing the pains of the managers and staff of your hotel. Just like a true Hero, their multiple special abilities and skills will guarantee that your Hotel will remain victorious and always ahead of the competition.

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Max Roseland is a Hotel Channel Manager in charge of selling 300+ hotel rooms through different online distribution channels: OTAs, retail travel agents, metasearch engines, GDS, the hotel’s website, and their social media. Max’s stress level is critical, and he is always struggling to manage the room’s inventory in each channel. To sell the rooms, he split the inventory across the channels trying to forecast which channel will generate more reservations. Once the distributions channels start to generate reservations Max needs to update the inventory in the Hotel PMS/CRS and across the channels one more time.

Max’s job has several pains that affect him and the performance of the hotel. Doing all this work on his own is time-consuming for him and the staff, the complex task also gives open room for human error that can cause overbooking chaos or even unsold rooms that result in low revenues. To save Max and the hotel we need a hero.

Introducing the Hero SiteMinder. Founded in 2007, by Mike Ford, SiteMinder is a cloud operated Channel Management System created to improve the Hotel’s reservation department operations and accelerate the hotel’s online presence. Our hero’s system updated the availability and rates of hotel’s rooms inventory directly to major OTAs and retrieves the reservations from these OTAs accordingly, making it easy for hotels to offer its rooms online, avoiding possible overbooking, low booking, and rate uniformity issues.

Our Hero has +859 integrations across online travel agents, property management systems, central reservation systems and more, to ensure that the SiteMinder System is compatible, and can be seamlessly incorporated into the majority of hotel’s systems to save hoteliers, acting as a real-time channel manager, effectively selling rooms online, updating inventory and online offers real-time; without the need of additional software.

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SiteMinder also counts with extra superpowers under their sleeves, like:

  • The Booking Button: it is an Online Booking Engine that helps hoteliers rescue reservations, attracting traffic directly to their website rather than through OTA platforms, to guarantee 100% income and No commission for reservations. With the simplified booking system, it allows customers to complete the online booking in 2 steps through computers, mobile devices, or even through Facebook. This extra feature also has comprehensive integrations with channel managers, websites, and PMSs. A 14-day trial version is available to test this skill and it can be fully implemented for a monthly fee of 104.00 euros for a 100-room inventory.
  • Canvas: A Hotel’s Website Design system that helps hotels to capture the bookings from travelers searching online, converting them into guests while enjoying commission free revenue, with a modern and appealing website look. Canvas solution provides the hotels with pre-made themes to apply to their websites, with an easy to use interface that allows them to edit the colors, options, and pictures to give the website a look that goes according to their brand. Having a website design system allow hoteliers to have control over the touchpoints on the pre-stage of the guest’s journey while transforming the pain of finding and managing website developers, and uncertainty of expensive website designer costs, into the enjoyment of having full ownership and control of the hotel’s website with a standard fee of 75 euros per month, for each 100-room on inventory.
  • SiteMinder Insights: A smart platform that gives hoteliers a single place to access trusted, clear, and relevant real-time data on their market and performance. With forecasting features that allow hotel managers to plan for the future and stay on top of their game. This feature counts with an Intelligent Pricing System skill, that provides real-time pricing of your competitors and OTAs, with an alert system that allows adjusting your reservation fees on time to stay on top of the competition today and tomorrow. This skill is critical to have the best offer available on your booking engine at all times, to guarantee a direct flow of traffic to the hotel.
  • GDS by SiteMinder: Give hotel managers access to all GDS’s integrated into a single interface, reducing cost and complex situation on signing and dealing with individual GDS’s. This allows exposing the hotel inventory to more than 600.000 travel agencies worldwide who search for room offers via GDS’s systems. This skill helps to save time and money, with seamless integration to the hotel’s PMS or CRS, eliminating manual data entry, human error, and double bookings. Its Instant Insight Reports helps to analyze the performance of the hotel channels and access to data needed to improve distribution strategies.
  • The Hotel Apps Store: it’s their last integrated feature that serves as a platform with over 100 digital solutions that might help hoteliers to meet their needs. The apps offered can be fully integrated into the hotel’s PMS or the SiteMinder CM, to power up their functionality and avoiding multiple software of applications.

Future Levels – Interview with James Bishop

The Senior Director – Global Demand Partnerships of SiteMinder talks with us about the future of their solution. He expresses that their Channel Manager system will continue to be the core of the platform, but they aim to continue evolving along with the world of travel to keep developing and offering solutions and reach their goal to be a complete Guest Acquisition Platform. He expresses that SiteMinder is always updating its existing features to offer the best solutions to the hotels and stay up to their game.

We also talked about the challenges and opportunities of their solution under the background of Artificial Intelligence Technologies. Bishop reflects that AI – Machine learning is going to be crucial for hotels to understand their data and why, when, and where the guest books, and at what rate they will pay, to help hotels have an insightful look at their data and help them with Occupancy, RevPAR and ADR. SiteMinder is taking effort on how to adopt AI tech applications to make their solution smarted, rather than concentrating on solutions scalability. Moreover, they aim to focus on applying AI to make sure those technologies proactively do the right things and the right points of time, to improve the customer journey within the right segments.

SiteMinder will also continue to improve the ecosystem and offers of its new Hotel App Store to provide hoteliers with the power to connect with their customers at every touchpoint throughout their travel journey.

The SiteMinder solution has a free 14-day trial to test their main features and their fees are defined by the number of rooms that the hotels have on inventory. If the hotel owns 100 rooms, the channel manager subscription will be 161.00 euros monthly (excluding taxes) and 5% discount by paying annually. Their fee structure is extremely attractive for hoteliers since other solutions charge by the commission, this allows them to have a fixed cost in their financial statements and have more accurate financial forecasting of their business.

In 2020, SiteMinder has been recognized as the number 1 Channel Manager Software and broke the elusive billion-dollar valuation. This recognition added to their strong product portfolio shows that SiteMinder is the Superman of hotel solutions, and is working hard to keep hoteliers happy by saving their revenue, lower their stress levels and giving them control of all touchpoints in the guest journey for the ultimate traveler experience.

References:

 Pictures sources: https://www.siteminder.com

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