PPHE Hotel Group embraces nimble new approach with SiteMinder Multi-Property

Being adaptable as a hotel group is a difficult assignment. But as any distribution manager will attest to, the positive bottom line impacts are real if trends can be responded to quickly and met with the right solutions.

For PPHE Hotel Group, a hospitality real estate company operating the Park Plaza and art’otel brands across Europe, this is certainly true – its laser focus on responsiveness currently proving invaluable. As markets spring to life, and PPHE’s award-winning hotels and restaurants are filled to capacity in one region, another can simultaneously be experiencing speed bumps, making the need to be adaptive essential.

Catering to both the leisure and business segments, PPHE’s distribution team has turned to SiteMinder Multi-Property, which enables its hotels to load, manage and distribute their rates centrally, to help them work smarter in the current climate.

Michelle Steyn, the Director of Distribution, Reservations and Customer Service at PPHE Hotel Group, provides an insight into the core issues her team was looking to solve for, and the results so far.

“We definitely knew we needed to be more nimble, and with SiteMinder Multi-Property, a task like loading multiple rate plans has become much easier,” she explained.

“To provide a tangible example, we recently rolled out a new channel, Trip.com, for 11 hotels across three regions. Where previously it would have taken two team members four to five days to complete this task, one person finalised the set up within just two.”

For Michelle and her team, this additional speed to market can be the difference between activating a new channel and gaining exposure to a range of new guests ​​– or not.

“We work in a hyper fast-paced industry, and sometimes opted against rolling out new rate plans and channels in the past, simply due to the amount of time it took to set them up for multiple properties. We feel confident that, with SiteMinder Multi-Property, a lot of that time and effort has been taken away.”

As well as the efficiencies that working across multiple, always-changing markets demands, support and reliability were two other concerns for Michelle, particularly as planning ramps up for the European summer.

“While the health checks function allows us to see any issues under one tab, when we do need more help, the SiteMinder team is always very responsive and knowledgeable,” she said.  “As the first hotel company to go live with the Opera Xchange Interface, there was close collaboration with the development team in Sydney, and our system enhancement requests were always taken on board and implemented.”

“The team understood our needs, and tweaked the interface to optimise performance accordingly. The reliability of SiteMinder Multi-Property is also important to us. The technology is solid and stable and we very rarely experience any channel outages.”

With summer fast approaching at the time of writing, PPHE Hotel Group is only expecting an increase in commercial gains as it grows with SiteMinder.