Bangkok, Thailand – SiteMinder, the world’s leading open hotel commerce platform, has partnered with Thai food delivery platform Robinhood to drive the expansion of Robinhood Travel, an all-in-one platform for booking hotels, flights, tours and activities in Thailand. The partnership, which will make Robinhood Travel accessible to the thousands of hotels that use SiteMinder’s hotel commerce platform in Thailand, is part of Robinhood’s 2022 mission to support the recovery of the travel industry by bringing more bookings to the country’s accommodation businesses.
In place of commission fees, Robinhood Travel will require booked hotels to wait until after a hotel guest has completed their stay to be paid in full. Robinhood Travel’s cashless payment system, supported by Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) which launched Robinhood in 2020, will mean hotels can gain access to funds faster than the speed typically supported by online travel agencies.
Srihanath Lamsam, Managing Director of Purple Ventures Co Ltd, the developer and service provider of the Robinhood platform, says the partnership will create a cost-effective way for hoteliers to rebuild their businesses at a time when domestic travel is proving vital for Thailand’s accommodation sector.
“Thailand’s tourism industry was impacted severely when international travel plunged and we could see that accommodation businesses were among the most vulnerable groups suffering from the situation. Believing in the industry’s ability to bounce back, we created Robinhood Travel to alleviate the pain we saw local operators feeling,” says Srihanath.
“In a short period of time, Robinhood has grown to attract more than two million users. If we can duplicate that success with Robinhood Travel and give visibility to Thailand’s hotels—without charging them booking commissions—we can help thousands of local hotel businesses, especially small operators, take important steps towards recovery. Our integration with SiteMinder, the known market leader in online commerce for hotels in Thailand, is critical to our mission, as it ensures Robinhood Travel can be used by the wide range of local hotels that have trusted and used SiteMinder’s platform for many years.”
Bradley Haines, SiteMinder’s regional vice president of Asia Pacific, says, “Having emerged from food delivery, Robinhood is a business that deeply understands the needs, behaviours and preferences of Thai consumers—an understanding that unites us in this mission to support hoteliers to market, sell and grow their businesses. Our purpose at SiteMinder has long been to open up every hotel’s access to the world of online commerce and, with Robinhood Travel, we’re pleased to be living out this purpose alongside a brand that millions of consumers have come to depend on for their online purchasing needs.”
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About SiteMinder
SiteMinder (ASX:SDR) is the world’s leading open hotel commerce platform, ranked among technology pioneers for opening up every hotel’s access to online commerce. It’s this central role that has earned SiteMinder the trust of tens of thousands of hotels, across 150 countries, to sell, market, manage and grow their business. The global company, headquartered in Sydney with offices in Bangkok, Berlin, Dallas, Galway, London and Manila, generated more than 100 million reservations worth over US$35 billion in revenue for hotels in the last year prior to the start of the pandemic.