A completely digitised guest journey and service experience. Innovative apartment designs and boutique studios in top European cities. A scalable business model that’s quickly attracting new partners and investors. Numa has made these factors instrumental in its growth since the start-up first launched in Berlin in 2018. Today, the company runs nearly 80 properties with several more exciting projects in the pipeline.
Since 2021, the group has been using SiteMinder – one of the industry’s leading hotel platforms – to optimise and streamline online distribution. We recently had a chat with Estefanía Gómez, manager of operations at Numa, to learn how this solution supports the brand’s ambitious expansion plans.
Table of contents
Extensive connectivity options broaden brand reach
Before implementing SiteMinder, Estefanía and her team had to use several channel managers to list their properties on all the OTAs they wanted to access. This created extra manual work and restricted Numa’s ability to get in front of its target audience.
“We wanted to connect all our OTAs via a single channel manager instead of having to use several solutions to manage our distribution. But it was hard to find a platform that fulfilled all our requirements,” Estefanía recounted.
Finally they found what they were looking for.
“SiteMinder’s channel manager was the only one that connected to all channels we wanted to work with. That includes the major OTAs as well as a wide variety of niche sites many other providers don’t cover.”
This makes it much easier for Numa to be present on a broad range of channels, all while simplifying their distribution set-up.
Powerful multi-property feature saves hours of work
Numa’s previous distribution solution also didn’t offer a multi-property environment. This made it increasingly challenging to effectively manage online sales as the group grew its portfolio. With SiteMinder, they’ve been able to cut down the time it takes to manage rate plans by 90%.
“In the past, we had to add or update rate plans separately for each property. That meant it could take up to two days to input all the settings for a new promotion. SiteMinder’s multi-property feature lets us apply bulk updates across as many hotels as we want. As a result, we can process all changes in one go and get it done in just 30 minutes,” Estefanía said.
The same goes for connecting new properties with SiteMinder. As a quickly growing brand, fast and easy set-up is critical for Numa.
“Sometimes we launch two or three new hotels at the same time. The multi-property capability lets us apply our standard rate plans to all new hotels instead of having to do it one by one.”
The team can then add individual settings to fine-tune each property’s set-up as needed.
More autonomy with Auto Activation
With its previous solution, whenever a Numa property wanted to add another channel, they could establish the connection but still had to wait for the support team to finalise the activation. This often caused unwelcome delays, which have now been alleviated by SiteMinder’s platform.
“The Auto Activation feature allows us to complete the entire set-up process on our own now. SiteMinder even outlines the exact steps we need to follow for each channel. Since it only takes about half an hour to do that and load all the information, we can connect and go live with new channels the same day,” Estefanía highlighted.
That’s especially helpful given Numa’s expansion plans and their dynamic approach to online distribution: “We’re growing fast and always have new properties or channels to add. It’s fantastic that we can just go live without having to wait for support. That saves us lots of time on communication and makes us more flexible.”
Straightforward brand-wide roll-out
When Numa initially implemented SiteMinder, the group went live with one property at a time. This gave them the chance to ensure each hotel was correctly set up and everything would run smoothly from the get-go.
“Migrating all our hotels and their distribution channels to SiteMinder was a big project. But it went smoothly thanks to their staff’s dedicated support. They were always there to answer questions and provide hands-on assistance when needed. Of course, it also helps that the platform is intuitive and user-friendly, making it easy for our team to get the hang of it,” Estefania explained.
Advice to peers
To round out our chat, we asked Estefanía what advice she would share with colleagues who are interested in levelling up their online distribution.
Her answer was straight to the point:
“I always recommend SiteMinder’s platform. If you look at all the options it offers in terms of connectivity, inventory and rate management, it’s the most comprehensive distribution solution.”
But that’s not all.
“Another thing that sets SiteMinder apart is that you can rely on it to easily manage all your properties and prices in one place. That’s great for groups or clusters with many hotels and diverse rate plans. For some of our larger properties, we have mapped over 200 rate plans, and it all works smoothly,” Estefanía concluded.
Thank you, Estefanía, for the wonderful feedback! It’s been fantastic to work with an innovative brand like Numa and we’re excited to see what you have in store for us in the future. All the best!