Face-to-Face: Mike Ford
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Travel Daily chats with Mike Ford, co-founder & CEO of SiteMinder, about the company’s recent partnership with Ctrip and his future expansion plans…
1) You recently announced a major new connection with Ctrip. Is China the big new market for you, and can we expect you to expand further there in future?
The Chinese traveller is not only a big market for our hotels, but for the rest of the world, and our connection with Ctrip now allows us to connect our hotels across the globe to this market. In terms of offering our technology to Chinese hotels, we do have existing customers in China and it’s a big market for our future, but our sales efforts have not been focused there to date.
2) What challenges does a company like SiteMinder face in China?
Finding the right partners is one of the biggest challenges. Enabling the products is the easy part; it’s getting the right people in place to deal with hotels in China that is more of a challenge. We have not yet focused our sales efforts there, but we anticipate that having the right partnerships in place (including with local booking channel connections) will be critical before we tackle the market head on.
3) Apart from China, which emerging Asian markets is SiteMinder focusing on?
Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia are our largest Asian markets, but more recently we have also focused on Malaysia, Hong Kong and Macau, and they are growing nicely.
4) You received significant investment earlier this year from a Silicon Valley-based company; to what extent has this driven your expansion?
To date, I would say that the main impact of this funding has been the rapid acceleration of establishing our large operating facility in Dallas, Texas. However, while our US entry was certainly accelerated by the recent funding, our expansion in the other parts of the globe can be attributed to existing momentum.
The impacts of funding in other parts of the world will soon be felt; it takes time for the investment to start paying dividends, due to ramp up times.
The same goes for new investments in products. We anticipate seeing the fruits of this investment in our product releases, which will accelerate throughout 2015 with the launch of exciting new products as well as notable overhauls to existing ones.
5) The number of online booking channels seems to be growing all the time, from OTAs to mobile apps and social media. What, in your view, will be the major trends in terms of hotel distribution and channel management over the coming years?
Meta search is a big one. The meta channels are very interested in gaining direct access to the hotel supplier, which we are able to deliver. Google Hotel Finder is slowly making inroads and TripAdvisor is very active in the space as well. I think, increasingly, we will see more sophisticated distribution tools and more of a focus on direct marketing technologies that hotels can use to connect directly with guests. Through all of these offerings, connectivity is still key and that’s where we remain strong. Direct marketing, distribution and booking tools will be big focuses as hotels try to wrestle the OTAs for business and lower distribution costs.
6) What further developments can we expect to see from SiteMinder in the future, and what are your company’s main goals?
You can expect SiteMinder to continue developing category-leading platforms that allow hotels to connect to their guests over the web, both through direct and indirect means. Our goal is to continue playing a pivotal role in the hotel integration and connectivity landscape.
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