Worldwide: Hotel commerce platform SiteMinder has added price comparison website trivago to its metasearch program, as well as introducing the ability for hotels to process payments within the platform.
Through Demand Plus, SiteMinder’s metasearch solution, hotel bookings and campaigns are managed by SiteMinder. The addition of trivago means that direct reservations via the hotel’s own website from trivago can now be made.
In addition to growing Demand Plus, SiteMinder has also enhanced its Pay program by allowing guest payments to be made within the platform. The new digital capability allows hotel subscribers to securely process payments and refunds for bookings made via OTAs rather than processing credit cards manually.
Research from SiteMinder shows that four in five hotels currently log in to its platform at least daily to access the credit card details of their guests and manually enter these details into a property management system. Digitising this process with an integrated payment solution saves time – early adopters of SiteMinder Pay reported an average of 4.2 minutes saved in manual handling per booking.
The growth of SiteMinder’s Demand Plus and Pay program addresses two areas of e-commerce for hotels: direct bookings via metasearch and managing payments.
“Right now, hoteliers across the globe are faced with the dual challenge of fewer travellers and an increasingly-complex plethora of digital marketing options,” said Dai Williams, chief growth officer at SiteMinder. “Most hotels don’t have the budgets and resources they need to leverage all the opportunities available to make themselves more visible and improve the management of their revenue. The growth of SiteMinder’s metasearch and payments programs is part of our commitment to supporting hotels with more choice, during this difficult time and as travel recovers.”
In the year ending March 2021, SiteMinder’s Demand Plus and Pay program grew over 50 per cent. Benedikt Winkels, business development manager at Hotel Aquino in Berlin, commented: “Even in light of the overall difficult market conditions, we have seen an encouraging number of bookings coming through Demand Plus. To us it’s an important component of our efforts to increase direct revenue as the market recovers and into the future.”
Mauricio Hernandez, manager of commercial connections at Grupo MX in Mexico, said: “Demand Plus has increased direct reservations for my hotel by 30 percent. As our official site offers the most competitive rates and now appears in metasearch channels, it gives us more possibilities to generate direct reservations.”
