January 21, 2015 – The global hotel industry’s leading provider of online distribution technology, SiteMinder, today announces it has secured one of Spain’s largest hotel chains, Sercotel, to cement its growing hold of the local Spanish market.
The announcement comes one week ahead of the world’s tourism trade fair for the Ibero American markets, FITUR, being held in Madrid.
Sercotel says, to date, nearly half of the hotel chain’s portfolio in Spain – which comprises 124 predominantly four-star properties with a total of 16,000 rooms that attract 4.6 million overnight stays per year – have signed up to use SiteMinder’s Channel Manager, the industry’s leading channel management platform, with more properties expected to go live in 2015.
“Our first SiteMinder-connected property went live last year and it didn’t take long for nearly half of our other hotels across the country to follow,” says Javier Taus’a, COO of Sercotel Hotels.
“Using SiteMinder’s Channel Manager, our hotels have not only gained real-time access to more than 200 of the world’s top distribution channels, but they have been able to reduce their costs of guest acquisition while increasing their revenue. A number of the signed properties have also integrated their property management system with The Channel Manager to capitalize on SiteMinder’s fully-integrated, two-way solution from online to their front desk.”
Sercotel has established 154 hotel properties located in over 106 destinations across Spain, Andorra, Portugal and Colombia over the past 20 years. Its hotels are renowned in the Spanish market, in particular, for their quality and convenient locations – in the city centers, the central business districts and in unique remote locations such as Navarre in the country’s north. Over the past five months, alone, the fast-growing hotel chain has opened the properties of Hola Tafalla, Plana Parc, Europa, Espahotel Plaza España, Espahotel Gran Via, Espahotel Bas’lica, Enc’n Golf and others in Spain. It has also grown internationally with the new properties of Bogotá Plaza, Casa Real, Richmond Suites and the emblematic Torre Cali in Colombia.
Sercotel is the latest hotel chain to continue the global adoption of SiteMinder’s Channel Manager. Over the 12 months ending 30 June 2014, The Channel Manager contributed to the US$7.4 billion revenue and 18 million reservations that SiteMinder’s market-leading technology facilitated for hotels worldwide.
SiteMinder’s VP Sales EMEA, Jason Lewis, says, “Recent data shows the hotel markets in Spain and Portugal have experienced RevPAR growth since 2011, with consistent demand increases of 4.8 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively.[1] It is due to this growth that Southern Europe continues to be a key market for SiteMinder, and we are thrilled groups such as Sercotel are seeing the benefits of streamlining their online distribution through best-in-class technology.”
[1] Spain, Portugal hotels show growth, Hotel News Now, 7 January 2015
