Somewhere between your PMS and the OTA, rooms go missing. SiteMinder just counted them.
SiteMinder checked one top channel and found 11% of its hotels' rooms missing. Now it's building an AI to find them.
by Markus Busch
The company said it out loud. SiteMinder, the channel manager that says it serves 56,000 properties, announced its Dynamic Commerce Engine this week. The release leads with pricing. The part that matters sits further down: the engine will look for broken connections to distribution channels and for unmapped room types, problems SiteMinder says "often go unnoticed" and put at a multi-billion-dollar cost to hotels. The connections it's describing are the ones SiteMinder sells. The engine goes live over the coming months, and a hotel will have to approve each change before it's made.
It put a number on it. SiteMinder looked at its hotel customers connected to one top-performing channel and found that 11% of their rooms, about 24,000, weren't listed on it, it told PhocusWire. It didn't name the channel or date the study, and the figure comes from the company selling the fix. It's still a channel manager counting the gaps in its own customers' setups.
Why connections break. Every room you sell through a channel rests on a match someone made once: your room type in the PMS, the same room in the channel manager, and the listing on the channel. A renamed room type, a new rate plan or a new channel each needs a match of its own, and the stack keeps adding channels, from Google to the AI agents that now take bookings. Sankar Narayan, SiteMinder's chief executive, put the questions himself: are hotels set up properly, do they have the right rate plans, the right inventory settings?
Why nobody sees it. A broken match doesn't send an error to the front desk. The room simply stops appearing on that channel, and a guest searching there books the hotel down the street. Nothing looks wrong in the reservations report, because a booking that never happened leaves no trace in it.
The limits. The 11% is SiteMinder's own figure, from one unnamed channel. The engine isn't live, SiteMinder hasn't said what it will cost, and it can only check the connections that run through SiteMinder.
What it means for your hotel. On Monday, ask your channel manager for a list of every room type and rate plan that isn't mapped on each channel you sell through, as of today. If an engine can score those gaps in a few months, the data behind them exists now. Then hold that list against what your team believes is live.
Read also: Nobody closed the file on a hotel that no longer exists.
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