A couple of years ago, SiteMinder, the Australia-based hotel technology provider, targeted North America as a market, having already expanded to receive a majority of its revenue from hotels in Europe.
The company’s progress was slower than expected. In the US, it took the company more than a year and a half to get its feet.
But it says it is now on-boarding a couple hundred properties every month in the US onto its cloud-based software, which allows hotels to market themselves on the internet worldwide.
Globally, it says it is putting on around six or seven hundred new hotels every month.
It says it has recently invested heavily in offices with localized service teams on the ground in Southeast Asia as well as in Australia Pacific, Europe, and North America.
In June, the company rolled out its first venture in hotel revenue management with a product called Prophet.
To catch up on what’s new, Tnooz spoke with CEO Mike Ford.
SiteMinder’s signature product is a channel manager. But the core product in a hotel’s tech stack is arguably the property management system (PMS). What’s the state of the PMS?
“PMS companies are in a quandary. Hotels are integrating with all of these cloud-based services, and they’re expecting their PMSs to provide the connectivity.
Today’s PMS has got to be a totally integrated platform on the outside as well as on the backend. The PMSs that don’t integrate broadly will lose customers. I predict big shifts in market share around that….”
What’s happening with the hotel technology stack overall?
“I predict that today’s fragmented market will stay fragmented. I don’t see any company taking over the vertical tech stack, or even the horizontal tech stack….
Hotels are getting out of the old mindset of refreshing their technology on a long cycle, like every five or seven years. Cloud-based tools — and we’re just one of many out there — let hotels get up and running with services in a short time….
Read rest of the article at Tnooz
