SITEMINDER
Choctaw Casino Resort, Durant, Oklahoma
company like Choctaw, that’s huge because they can sell all 1,000 rooms online, at any stage, to any operator they work with, and no longer rely only on their top sellers.
CI: Why hasn’t it always been like this? It makes such perfect sense. FC: Channel managers have been around for some time; the better part of the last 15 years, but SiteMinder was the first to develop a true pooled inventory model from a channel management perspective. The challenge for the industry has been in the way that technology was developed to provide two-way connectivity to those channels. SiteMinder was the first to provide a reliable two-way interface for the plethora of channels out there to connect with us and ultimately with hotels. A lot of our competitors will claim they update
400, 500, even 600 channels, but in reality many of those connections don’t allow for a hotel’s data to flow two ways; some are just one-way, so they may only deliver inventory, not rates, for example, and then fail to deliver reservations back to a hotel in real time so the hotel gets overbooked. Some providers screen-scrape [low-tech, unauthorised access to a site where data is lifted or ‘scraped’ from the screen to update another site with for example, room availability] when they don’t have what we call a ‘direct connect’, or an actual connection, with that channel. This reality imposes several problems on hotels because, for a hotel to efficiently and cost- effectively manage their inventory, all their systems need to be able to speak with one another and recognise real time availability and rates. SiteMinder also introduced a very disruptive business model to the industry. Many of our
competitors still charge on a transactional, per- booking basis – we work off a flat monthly fee. It doesn’t matter if you get 1,000 bookings or 15,000, you pay the same amount. So, if you are a casino group with, say, 20,000 hotel rooms being booked through various channels each day, the traditional, transactional model might have you paying anything up to $100,000 in fees just to get your rooms out there; compare that to our top rate of $799 per month for a property with more than 500 rooms, and you can see where our customers save money. I know at least one hotel group here in the US that could’ve saved a quarter of a million dollars every year just by using our tech. For small independent hotels, it’s this disruptive model that they find so attractive because they can be paying a fee as low as $75 each month and benefit from using the exact same technology as the largest brands and chains.
CI: How many hotel customers does SiteMinder
have now? What’s been your story? FC: We now have more than 22,000 hotel
customers and our footprint is very much global, although we began and are headquartered in Sydney and we have very dominant market share across Australia and New Zealand. Europe and Asia came next, and we now play a major role in those regions. It’s only been in the last couple of years that we entered the US market, where many of our competitors are headquartered, and already the US makes a respectable portion of our global customer base. While SiteMinder is one of the newer companies in the sector, we are firmly established and have evolved with smart, sleek, sexy technology, keeping the hotel user in mind always.
AUGUST 2016 39
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