Dallas, US – The hotel industry’s leading cloud platform, SiteMinder, today announced that it has partnered with priceline.com, a leader in online and mobile travel, to offer hotels an advanced way of distributing their inventory online. The partnership integrates priceline.com into SiteMinder’s Channel Manager, providing hotels a new way to reach travelers making their hotel reservations through priceline.com’s apps or mobile web.

Priceline.com’s vice president, hotel, Craig Schickler, says, “We’ve aligned with SiteMinder to offer our mutual hotel customers a cost-effective alternative to managing the distribution of their rooms through priceline.com. SiteMinder’s growth in capturing the needs of more than 20,000 hotel customers globally is impressive, and we attribute that very much to its industry leadership in providing hotels with technology that is accessible, reliable and fast.”

Using priceline.com, travelers everywhere have the opportunity to save on hotels, flights, rental cars, vacation packages and cruises. Travelers can also take advantage of the website’s Name Your Own Price® to receive the lowest prices available, or Express Deals®, where they can take advantage of hotel discounts without the need to bid.

Fig Cakar, managing director of SiteMinder’s Americas region, says the integration of priceline.com with SiteMinder’s Channel Manager could be a “game changer” for hotels that have only known more traditional, often-costlier ways to have their rooms distributed to the leading booking website.

“Due to the low, flat fee involved in subscribing to SiteMinder’s Channel Manager, hotels now have the opportunity to keep their rates and availability updated in real-time on priceline.com without having to incur large costs for every transaction made. For the average-sized independent hotel that’s challenged with limited visibility and reach to potential guests online, this is a huge benefit,” says Mr Cakar.

“Together, SiteMinder and priceline.com have the opportunity to harness all the lessons we have learned over the years, from the hundreds of integrations we have deployed between us, and provide a distribution model that’s sustainable and profitable for hotels.”

According to Phocuswright and h2c’s Independent Lodging Market Report, co-sponsored by SiteMinder, less than forty percent of Europe’s independent properties use a channel manager while in the US, independent lodging operators say they acknowledge the importance of effective distribution but lack the ability, systems, budget and time to exploit the opportunities.