A New Zealand hotel has increased bookings by almost a third over the last 12 months following its decision to adopt SiteMinder’s Channel Manager. And early reports show the latest integration between the hotel’s ClarityLive Property Management System and SiteMinder is fuelling a similar increase in business.
The luxury, boutique Auckland property, Hotel DeBrett, is one of many NZ and UK hotels that use the ClarityLive Hotel Manager PMS, which is owned by NZ hospitality software company, Clarity NZ. The company has integrated its ClarityLive Hotel Manager PMS with SiteMinder’s plug-and-play ‘pmsXchange’ API (application programming interface) technology, which now links Clarity’s hotel clients, such as Hotel DeBrett, with major online booking sites around the world.
Hotel DeBrett is the first Clarity client to have its ClarityLive Hotel Manager PMS connected to the world’s leading booking sites via SiteMinder. Hotel DeBrett Director, John Courtney, said SiteMinder’s connection between the PMS and online channels had increased efficiency, significantly reduced staff time spent on inventory allocation and boosted bookings. “Adopting SiteMinder increased the hotel’s marketing network substantially but it took integration between the ClarityLive PMS and SiteMinder’s Channel Manager to fully utilise this network through improved inventory distribution,” Mr Courtney said.
“Adopting SiteMinder into our online strategy facilitated an increase of around 25-30 per cent in our daily bookings and allowed us to grow a basic domestic reach to an internationally competitive one in a very short period of time,” he saidSiteMinder Partnerships Manager, Duncan Waterman, said the new, two-way integration means live availability and rates for ClarityLive’s hotel clients will be automatically updated on major accommodation booking sites worldwide while reservations from those sites will be seamlessly delivered by SiteMinder directly back into the ClarityLive PMS.“To operate in today’s competitive and challenging market, hotels need to cut costs and improve efficiency and that’s what SiteMinder’s pmsXchange product helps them to achieve,” Mr Waterman said. “The fact SiteMinder charges a flat monthly rate, and not a per-booking fee, saves hotels money and helps drive down the cost of acquisition.”
Clarity NZ General Manager, Dougall Love, said the new connection had helped maximise the reach for Clarity’s clients like Hotel DeBrett. “While the integration with SiteMinder has been straightforward and robust from a technical side of things, the big advantage for clients like Hotel DeBrett is that bookings are automatically entered back into the PMS, eliminating the need to manually enter hundreds of reservations which can cause errors. This is a big, labour-saving advantage so Hotel DeBrett is very happy with it,” Mr Love said.