SITEMINDER
Optimise your inventory with SiteMinder
C
hoctaw Casinos – a group with just shy of 1,000 hotel rooms at four Oklahoma properties – signed up to use SiteMinder’s channel manager to streamline its booking system and
increase efficiency in inventory distribution. SiteMinder’s platform allows the group to have all of those rooms available across every booking platform, and keep them updated in real time by using a pooled inventory system. Fig Cakar [right], Managing Director, Americas, for SiteMinder, explained how it works to Casino International.
Casino International: What does SiteMinder
actually do? Fig Cakar: Overall we are a tech company that
enables hotels to market, sell and distribute their rooms online through a broad suite of product solutions. Our flagship offering is channel management, and our work with Choctaw has them using our channel manager which allows them to connect to over 350 online channels, and then manage and distribute all their rates and inventory though that one platform. When you have over a thousand rooms at a property – as Choctaw does – having a single, reliable and stable distribution platform in place is paramount for scalability and optimising both your inventory and revenue.
CI: So you’re saying the tool is simply…
inventory management? FC: And distribution, yes. That’s exactly what our channel manager does. We are talking room inventory, of course; SiteMinder’s channel manager manages and distributes room rates and inventory for hotels so they can increase their chances of being booked online. Anyone can try and sell a thousand rooms but the most important thing is, what happens when you are down to the last five, ten, 20 rooms? How do you distribute those to 30, 40, 50 booking sites and give the sites equal access to sell those remaining five, ten, 20 rooms for you without running the risk of double booking? SiteMinder’s channel manager incorporates a
38 AUGUST 2016
There are thousands of ways to book a hotel room, most of them online; SiteMinder has a truly novel approach to optimising multi-channel booking, as Choctaw Casinos found out earlier this year.
pooled inventory model to solve this exact problem. The way it works is, let’s say you have only five rooms left but you’ve made your hotel bookable through 20 online channels; in the past, you would have had to take a guess as to how you best allocate those remaining five rooms between your 20 chosen channels, and then just hope for the best. Traditionally, hotels would give their last rooms to their strongest, best-performing channel. Now, hotels can take advantage of the pooled inventory model that SiteMinder’s channel manager provides so instead of having to give allocations to specific channels only, all of a hotel’s chosen channels get equal access to the five remaining rooms. So, if you have a guest searching on, say, Expedia, and that guest wants to buy three of your five remaining rooms, with the old model they might only be able to book the one or two that you allocated to Expedia; with our pooled inventory model, they can book their three rooms not just on Expedia but on every channel your hotel is listed on because you would’ve distributed your rooms to all your channels and given each the same access to your remaining inventory. SiteMinder has really allowed the hotel market to optimise their inventory right up to the last minute, which is crucial in today’s market where travellers are far more spontaneous in how they plan their trips.
CI: Did your service come about as a response
to how people book accommodation now then? You are enabling the supplier – in this case Choctaw – to treat all of its partners, and by extension their customers, with the exact same importance, all of the time. FC: Absolutely. SiteMinder’s channel manager has
very much levelled the playing field in the market, in every sense. In the past, without pooled inventory, the biggest, most dominant players might’ve controlled the supply, but now the opportunity is there for mid- and lower-scale players to have the same access. Hotel operators can now allow all of their channels to be on the same playing field and leave it with those channels to compete for the online consumer on the hotel’s behalf. It’s like first in best dressed. For a
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