Sydney, Australia – SiteMinder, the world’s leading open hotel commerce platform, has today announced it will acquire industry acclaimed hotel guest engagement suite GuestJoy, a cloud-based app that allows hoteliers to automate personalised, direct, contactless guest communications before, during and after their stay.
The acquisition, to be completed this year, follows the launch of SiteMinder’s next generation platform in April — an all-in-one hotel commerce platform that unifies SiteMinder’s channel management, distribution and booking engine products with real-time market insights, automated payments, website-building capabilities and more than 1500 partner integrations for accommodation providers to grow their businesses online. GuestJoy will further expand SiteMinder’s robust hotel commerce offering, allowing hoteliers to automate and digitise their guest communication, drive upsell revenues, and strengthen direct guest acquisition.
Sankar Narayan, CEO and MD of SiteMinder, said the agreement to acquire GuestJoy builds on a year of strong organic growth following the company’s IPO in 2021.
“We are thrilled to announce SiteMinder’s acquisition of GuestJoy this year. Great technology powers human connection, and this couldn’t be truer for hotel tech. GuestJoy is highly regarded within the hotel tech industry for its simple user experience, seamless guest communication functionalities and integration capabilities, which are essential for the modern hotelier to deliver a winning and profitable guest experience, while also optimising their booking and ancillary revenues. GuestJoy’s capability to automate and personalise guest communications will allow SiteMinder to offer a fully integrated user experience for our hoteliers, as we continue to deliver on our hotel commerce platform vision,” Sankar Narayan said.
Since 2014, GuestJoy has gained a strong reputation in the industry for its innovative, easy-to-use technology and for delivering high ROI for its customers. Founded by hospitality tech innovators Alar Ülem and Annika Ülem, GuestJoy was created to solve a key unmet need – to make it simpler and faster for hoteliers to communicate directly with their guests and increase customer value via their property management system.
“We know firsthand how distracting and cumbersome unfit technology can be while you are working hard to deliver an impeccable, memorable guest experience. It’s why we set ourselves the mission of designing GuestJoy to be very easy to use, using data-driven intelligence and automation. We also know that seamless, unified technology can transform hotel businesses, and this is why we are so proud that GuestJoy will become a SiteMinder company,” said GuestJoy Co-founder Alar Ülem.
“SiteMinder is unrivalled in its deep feature capabilities in hotel technology, and for its scale of connectivity in the hotel tech market. We can’t wait to join SiteMinder’s vision to bring every hotel into the new era of hotel commerce, by helping hoteliers connect meaningfully with their guests along every step of their accommodation journey,” said GuestJoy Co-founder Annika Ülem.
A SiteMinder Partner since 2017, GuestJoy is already a part of the SiteMinder ecosystem and will be fully integrated into the SiteMinder hotel commerce platform following the completion of the acquisition this year.
Media contact
Gemma Garkut
+61 2 8031 1287
media@siteminder.com
Investor information
Paul Wong
+61 411 889 876
investor.relations@siteminder.com
About GuestJoy
GuestJoy has been helping hoteliers seamlessly digitise, personalise and automate their guest engagement throughout the entire guest journey since 2014. In 2021, GuestJoy was named a finalist in Hotel Tech Report’s Best Upselling Software, and that same year, 70% of GuestJoy customers across 23 countries were named in TripAdvisor’s Travellers’ Choice Awards. GuestJoy has been a SiteMinder partner since 2017, with customers across the UK and Europe.
About SiteMinder
SiteMinder Limited (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.
Thursday, October 17th was HotelTime’s latest event, held in Prague, and the theme of the day was Automation in Hospitality – an event we were obviously keen to be a part of!
The Participants
Other than GuestJoy, the other participants included:
- Niall Lenihan, Partnerships Development Manager with our friends Net Affinity
- Alexander Edström, CEO of Atomize
- Travis Henry, Hospitality Director at Total Processing
- Jan Hejny, CEO of HotelTime Solutions
The Venue
The event was held at Hotel Don Giovanni, Prague; a wonderful 4-star, 400+ room hotel standing proudly in the heart of Europe. We had a very healthy attendance of over 80 hoteliers who were keen to learn the various ways that automation would be able to help their properties.
GuestJoy’s Presentation
Our presentation was titled How to Supercharge Your Revenue and Reputation by Doing Nothing.
We decided that we wanted to help dispel any of the negative connotations that our audience might have with automation. Hopefully, pointing out how automation is already a major part of our lives, and has been for a long time, went to some lengths to achieve that.
Principles of automation
Importantly, we wanted to share some principles about any automation you are considering for your property. They were:
- Automation should never detract from the guest experience. Remember, we run hotels, not Airbnbs, and guests expect a certain experience when they choose us.
- Automation should not force you to do extra work. The whole idea of automation is that we are streamlining existing tasks, whether they are big or small. So, in essence, once something is automated, it should be invisible.
- Any automation that you put in place should, at the very least, be cost-neutral. However, given the opportunities available from using automation, it’s fair to say that automation should give you a demonstrably high ROI.
- Finally, automation should never be overkill. This kind of relates to the first point, however, it’s more about the idea that automation shouldn’t be the answer to something that wasn’t a problem to begin with!
The key to automation in hotels
Next, we talked about the key to automation – the smartphone.
Some technology innovations come and go (does anybody remember 3D televisions?), but others are here to stay. And for hoteliers, the smartphone is the focal point of easy ways to automate many of their operations, because everybody has one!
When conducting research for this presentation, we found an excellent study – the Customer Engagement Technology Study 2019 – and in particular, we were fascinated with this particular chart:
So, with guest expectations already poised like this, we know that now is the time to start looking at how automating things in your property will pay off.
Automation is an opportunity
Far from being a buzzword, automation now presents as a serious opportunity to enhance the way your property operates and to provide an even better experience for your guests.
At GuestJoy, we’ve known this for a long time, and we have been busy building our unique platform that covers all parts of your guests’ journey: prior to their arrival, during their stay, and after their departure.
GuestJoy is like having an extra staff member on your team whose sole responsibility is to ensure seamless communication with your guests, enabling you to supercharge your upsell revenue and online reputation – without doing anything.
The bottom line
The end result, really, is that automation frees up you and your staff to allow you to focus on providing your guests with the best possible experience.
And that’s why so many people choose hotels in these times – the experience they can have. Nobody knows this better than GuestJoy, and that’s why our platform is the best of its kind!
Presenters on the day
Net Affinity
Net Affinity, a long-time friend of ours at GuestJoy, was represented by Niall Lenihan. Net Affinity is a company that is dedicated to driving more direct bookings at your property, via a host of products and consultative services.
Learn more about how Net Affinity can help your property here.
Atomize
Atomize is a company whose aim is to increase revenue and save you time by automatically setting the optimal price at any given moment, for every room type. Their CEO Alexander Edström presented on the day.
See how Atomize can help dramatically increase your revenue here.
Total Processing
Total Processing is a company dedicated to enabling hotels to accept payments online on their own terms. Being a bank-agnostic platform allows Total Processing to focus on the needs of their customers as their priority. Explaining all of this one day was Travis Henry.
Find out more about Total Processing and their services here.
HotelTime Solutions
Our fantastic hosts of this event and great partners at HotelTime Solutions produce HotelTime, a fully-featured cloud-based PMS system with more than 500 customers in 11 countries worldwide.
HotelTime Property Management System solution currently operates in properties as large as 400 rooms and as well as smaller properties with less than 50 rooms. It also enables chains with multiple properties to efficiently manage multi-property operations. CEO Jan Hejný presented on the day.
Discover just how much HotelTime Solutions can transform your own property here.
How to improve your hotel guest experience without breaking a sweat?
Would you like to know the answers to the following questions:
1. Why it’s important to sell an experience, not a product or a service?
2. How to package offers to sell more?
3. How to convert some of them into experiences?
4. Different personas at your hotel
If yes, then we have great news for you, because we’re organizing our very first webinar! For free!
More than ever, your guests expect technology to complement their stay. GuestJoy provides you with a digital guest platform; one that allows you to increase upsell revenue and get better reviews, all while providing your guest with a fantastic experience before, during, and after their stay.
Claim your free spot!
Let’s bring the hotel sector into the 21st century!
- GuestJoy – Apps versus web-apps. The pros and cons.
- HotelTime – Why open platforms (API) do it better. Should PMS be open to other vendors?
- Booking.com – Booking Story (evaluation), Our mission (Empower people), Our approach to innovation, Traditional Journey (Digital journey), Booking.com Experience, Booking Assistance and In-Stay services, Public transport.
Date: 28.02.2019
Time: 14:00 – 17:00
Location: Maison Bistro & Hotel at 1014 Budapest, Országház u. 17.
Format: casual with snacks and drinks
Register here
Speakers
Roland Bayer Account Manager Partner Services of Booking.com
Amir Fahmy Area Manager of Hungary of Booking.com
Filip Kühnel Director of Sales of HotelTime
Alar Ülem CEO & Co-Founder of GuestJoy
Jevgenia Petrosjan Market Manager Europe of GuestJoy