London, UK – SiteMinder, the leading cloud platform for hotels, is pleased today to unveil ‘Canvas’, an intelligent website creator that combines best practice in hotel e-commerce with beautiful designs for independent hoteliers.
Canvas will be unveiled at the travel industry’s largest stage, WTM London, and will form the latest addition to SiteMinder’s award-winning suite of smart and simple technology for hoteliers who are looking to attract, reach and convert guests globally online.
SiteMinder’s co-founder and managing director, Mike Ford, says, “For years, SiteMinder has provided a platform that successfully enables direct, commission-free bookings as well as the most powerful online distribution in the market.
“The launch of Canvas is about further empowering the world’s independent hoteliers who want full ownership, control and amplification of their most profitable channel – their website. Canvas is about enhancing the independent hotelier’s ability to compete in today’s consumer-led Internet economy. And, for SiteMinder, it’s about delivering on our goal of breaking down barriers for the world’s hoteliers, through easy-to-use, affordable technology that challenges the ever-increasing complexities they face daily to market and sell their rooms online.”
Using Canvas, hoteliers will be able to create and easily manage their website by selecting from a range of templates purposefully packaged for guided selling by design and user experience experts in hotel websites. Hotelier users will be able to customise their own pages through the cloud-based product and also preview those changes before making the decision to publish them live, instantly, on their website.
“Guests often don’t know how great a hotel is, because the first impression they had when they visited the website was poor and they immediately looked elsewhere. And this is assuming those guests found the website. Many of them are barely visible in search engines,” says Mr Ford.
“Canvas was designed specifically with independent hoteliers in mind, many of whom we have witnessed first-hand to be disadvantaged by their lack of technical or design expertise – and their constrained budget to acquire this expertise. For this reason, we wanted to make sure Canvas was intuitive, responsive and search-optimised, so these hoteliers could be found and stay up-to-date, when they wanted to. It purposefully brings together only the things a guest needs to make a booking decision online, and removes all the noise that turns them away.”
For maximised profit margin potential and in staying true to SiteMinder’s product philosophy, hotel customers will pay a low, flat monthly fee and have the option to seamlessly integrate the product with their Internet booking engine and SiteMinder’s Channel Manager.
Mr Ford says: “We want to start small. We’ve learnt a lot from our beta and live customers, and it is important to us that we continue to grow the product with our learnings, so we can best meet the changing needs of who this is for – the independent hotelier.”
