SiteMinder Buys GuestJoy to Boost Hotel Commerce Offerings

Hotel commerce platform SiteMinder is set to acquire GuestJoy, an app that lets hoteliers communicate with their guests.

As the company said in a news release Tuesday (Aug. 23), the acquisition, set to conclude later this year, will let hotels automate and digitize communications, fuel revenues from upsells and strengthen guest acquisition.

“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,” said Sankar Narayan, SiteMinder’s CEO and managing director.

Founded in 2014 by Alar Ülem and Annika Ülem, GuestJoy aims to make it easier for hoteliers to communicate directly with guests and increase customer value through 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,” said Alar Ülem. “It’s why we set ourselves the mission of designing GuestJoy to be very easy to use, using data-driven intelligence and automation.”

Based in Sydney, Australia, SiteMinder said it generated more than 100 million reservations worth more than $35 billion in revenue for hotels in the last year before the pandemic began.

The acquisition comes toward the end of a summer marked by the rise of what’s been dubbed “revenge travel,” as people who had spent two years cooped up at home began booking hotel rooms and reserving flights once more.

See also: ‘Revenge Travel’ Roars to Life With a Connected Economy Twist

As PYMNTS noted in June, travel bookings, from airplanes to Airbnb, are rebounding after a bleak 2020.

“I think in 2020, we saw an 84% drop in the amount of spend on travel. A very, very dramatic fall,” Jeni Mundy, global senior vice president of merchant sales and acquiring at Visa, said in an interview with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster.

“All of us, having lived through 2020 and 2021, we know how little we did travel, and we can definitely see that coming through in the Visa statistics,” said Munday. “Even in 2021, when we started to get out there a little bit more, travel was particularly constrained to mainly domestic, particularly in the U.S. where you are blessed with a very large country to travel in. We saw a lot of road trips in the U.S.”