Lagoon Beach Hotel in South Africa is situated near Cape Town’s business district and features exquisite views of the iconic Table Mountain. As the only hotel with direct access to the beautiful Lagoon Beach strip, it’s a truly convenient place for business and leisure-seekers alike.
With no channel manager, Lagoon Beach Hotel found managing online inventory labour-intensive and, at times, could not maintain parity across all its channels.
Other challenges included:
- Updating OTAs – the team would often struggle to update all their OTAs before it was time to change the rates again
- Manually updating websites and re-entering reservations – this could take up to 95% of the day.
Objectives
With 20% of Lagoon Beach Hotel’s bookings sourced online, their objectives were to:
- Find a channel manager that made selling online inventory less time- consuming and would streamline the management of OTAs
- Implement a channel manager that could integrate with its property management system (PMS)
- Source a booking engine that would assist in lifting online sales.
Solutions
The Channel Manager
Within 15 months of employing SiteMinder’s Channel Manager, Lagoon Beach Hotel increased the number of booking channels it connected to, from nine to twelve. The Channel Manager’s two-way functionality has also made changing rates much easier, with the dynamic availability benefiting room sales greatly.
Lagoon Beach’s resident channel manager, Gilbert Leibrandt, says:
“SiteMinder has absolutely helped us save money in terms of time. I especially like the ease of The Channel Manager’s reporting feature.”
PMS integration
The two-way integration allows Lagoon Beach Hotel to integrate its Opera PMS with SiteMinder’s Channel Manager. This ensures the hotel can continue to sell rooms when the office is not manned, as reservations filter directly into the system.
Gilbert says the PMS integration more accurately reflects availability:
“Reselling has become more effective. Previously, we would give each OTA an allocation; now we are providing them with all our inventory and selling becomes easier – any time of the day.”
TheBookingButton
SiteMinder’s smart, commission-free booking technology has offered Lagoon Beach Hotel a simple, grid-style display with a two-click booking process that has increased conversion rates.
Gilbert says:
“The feature I like most about TheBookingButton is the pre-arrival notification, which gives us the freedom to change content ourselves.”
GDS by SiteMinder
With the objective of integrating travel agent reservations directly into its PMS, via The Channel Manager, Lagoon Beach Hotel made the switch to GDS by SiteMinder.
One of the biggest benefits seen by the hotel has been the improved volume of bookings – which has, in turn, decreased the amount they pay in commissions.
“Prior to using GDS by SiteMinder, a number of the reservations we received needed to be added into the PMS manually, taking time away from staff,” says Gilbert.
Results
Using SiteMinder solutions, Lagoon Beach saw the following results between 2012-2013:
- An almost 100% increase in online bookings with The Channel Manager
- A 10% increase with SiteMinder’s TheBookingButton.
To those considering SiteMinder, Gilbert says:
“I would definitely recommend SiteMinder to anyone considering using its products. It saves a lot of time – that’s the big plus. You also avoid human error as everything goes via one channel.”
