SiteMinder has been recognized as a WBA Winner for Business Technology in the World Business Awards 2022. The World Business Award for Business Technology [BTM] recognizes organizations that have successfully implemented initiatives that demonstrate excellence in business technology management.

In an age of rising choice and accessibility for curious travellers, SiteMinder exists to liberate hoteliers with technology that makes a world of difference. SiteMinder is the global hotel industry’s leading guest acquisition platform, ranked among technology pioneers for its smart and simple solutions that put hotels everywhere their guests are, at every stage of their journey. The company has come a long way since its co-founders, Mike Ford and Mike Rogers, created the business in a Sydney rental house in 2006 to solve a problem that they saw across the hotel landscape. Ford found a way to connect hotel systems with different online channels to keep hotel pricing and availability updated in real-time. That was the birth of both SiteMinder and software-as-a-service (SaaS) in hotel channel management. Before then, hoteliers were charged a percentage of their channel revenue or a transaction fee per booking. In bringing their idea to life, SiteMinder made distribution affordable for every hotel.

SiteMinder has opened up what is widely-regarded as the largest and most open ecosystem within the global travel tech industry, having grown a partnership network that totals more than 800 partners around the world. SiteMinder was also the first global technology partner to Airbnb and Trip.com (formerly Ctrip), to create never-before-available avenues for hotels to attract some of the world’s most lucrative consumers. With 900+ employees across seven offices in Sydney, London, Galway, Dallas, Cape Town, Berlin and Bangkok, people in 23 countries and 80% of revenue now coming from outside of Australia, SiteMinder’s footprint has indeed become truly global.

SiteMinder’s flagship product is its channel manager, the leading and largest distribution platform for hotels to manage their online inventory, room rates and availability in real-time. SiteMinder’s channel manager connects hotels to 400+ of the world’s top accommodation booking sites (like Booking.com, Expedia.com and Airbnb) to provide greater reach for hoteliers. Secondly, SiteMinder’s booking engine (TheBookingButton) allows hoteliers to accept bookings directly through their website. This eliminates the need for them to pay commissions, and makes hoteliers less dependent on third-party sales. SiteMinder’s other products include its website builder (Canvas), which allows hoteliers to attract more global travellers by having the option of more than 20 different languages; Insights, which provides market and pricing intelligence in real-time to take the guesswork out of pricing hotel rooms; and GDS by SiteMinder, which allows hoteliers to list their property on the technology used by more than 600,000 travel agencies worldwide and be visible to travel agents who search for rooms. Finally, SiteMinder in November 2019 launched its Hotel App Store, and in doing so created the first marketplace that allows hotels of all sizes to easily discover, choose and connect applications to their business systems for greater guest experiences and revenue.

SiteMinder is the global market leader in hotel technology—an increasingly competitive space—so to be flexible and to meet the changing needs of its customers, the process across the entire business has been seen as remarkably positive, as can be displayed by several key outcomes. SiteMinder’s engineering team now has the capacity to triple in size to 300 people in the coming years, alongside almost quadruple the input of the system. SiteMinder can also build projects and ramp engineering capacity to both enable and accelerate business growth. The new architecture has provided SiteMinder the guarantee of control over its domains, so they can become significantly less error-prone and more effective. With microservices, SiteMinder can create a system where it is easier to assign work outside of a team member’s main problem domain, ultimately enabling a more collaborative, productive and efficient system. Additionally, while more than 80% of SiteMinder’s revenue now comes from overseas, the majority of SiteMinder’s engineering team remains based in Sydney, so equipping them with the right architecture has greatly powered the success of the business as a whole. The company’s engineering team has always been, and remains today, core to the success of SiteMinder as a fast-paced technology business. The result is that today, SiteMinder is one of Australia’s most successful homegrown tech companies and one of the largest adopters of microservices, alongside Spotify and Netflix. Since adopting microservices, SiteMinder has for example enjoyed significant milestones, including generating AU$100 million in annual recurring revenue, becoming the first hotel distribution platform to process 100 million reservations in one year, and becoming Australia’s newest tech unicorn.