SiteMinder, the global hotel industry’s leading guest acquisition platform, has launched a partnership with HotelSwaps, the world’s first hotel room exchange programme for independently owned and operated boutique and luxury hotels. Under the partnership, hotels that use SiteMinder and meet HotelSwaps’ membership criteria can now trade their unsold rooms with other hotels using HotelCoins®, HotelSwaps’ proprietary reservation system and digital currency.
The partnership is an opportunity for hotels to create an alternative value from otherwise unused rooms. By sharing those rooms with the global hotel community, hotels can increase their ancillary revenues during periods of lower occupancy, save on their business travel expenses, and offer attractive incentive programmes to their executive staff.
Preben Vestdam, Co-founder and CEO of HotelSwaps, says, “Hoteliers are doing a great job in optimising yields and maximising utilisation of their valuable hotel assets, but still billions of room nights stand empty every year in wonderful hotels around the world. HotelSwaps’ technology and HotelCoins© currency allow hoteliers to share such unused capacity within the community of hotel professionals for their mutual benefit.”
Adds James Bishop, Senior Director Global Demand Partnerships at SiteMinder, “We are pleased to offer HotelSwaps’ hotel members access to our technology where their entire inventory can be managed within one environment. Never has the influence of the sharing economy on the world been stronger and the threat of new competition for hotels been greater. With this new capability, independent boutique and luxury hotels are empowered to tap into a new, unique driver of occupancy and revenue, and share their perishable assets with like-minded hoteliers to benefit the industry as a whole.”
From today, HotelSwaps member hotels can use SiteMinder to maintain their live inventory within the HotelSwaps reservation system and receive reservations in parallel with their other distribution channels. Hotel customers of SiteMinder can connect to HotelSwaps through SiteMinder’s platform, as with any of the 400 other distribution channels that are available within the company’s open ecosystem.
