SiteMinder Opens Hotel Distribution to the AI Era

SiteMinder, the world’s leading hotel commerce platform, today announced new platform capabilities and partnerships designed to extend hotel distribution into the AI era.

Connecting 53,000 hotels across 150 countries to the channels where travellers search and book accommodation, SiteMinder is expanding its platform to support AI-driven direct booking and AI-powered online travel agency (OTA) pathways. The announcement reflects SiteMinder’s focus on helping hotels remain visible, competitive and bookable as AI becomes a larger part of travel planning and purchasing. DirectBooker is announced today as the inaugural AI demand partner.

SiteMinder is achieving this through two platform expansions.

First, Demand Plus, SiteMinder’s demand generation solution across Google, Trivago and TripAdvisor, is being extended beyond traditional metasearch into supported AI-driven conversational environments, including platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude. This enables travellers to discover hotels through curated recommendations, view live rates and complete their reservation on the hotel’s own booking page.

Through this approach, SiteMinder is establishing the hotel commerce infrastructure to enable AI demand partners to surface hotel inventory across a growing network of AI platforms, helping hotels extend their reach wherever travellers are planning and booking. DirectBooker, which connects live hotel rates to major and emerging AI platforms, is the inaugural partner in this pathway.

Second, through Channels Plus, SiteMinder’s multi-channel distribution solution, AI-enabled OTA and intermediary pathways that support search, comparison and booking on behalf of travellers will now gain access to SiteMinder’s hotel inventory. The full guest experience, from discovery to confirmed booking, will take place within the partner’s platform, with reservations flowing through SiteMinder to the property.

Across these two pathways, direct bookings on the hotel’s own site and bookings completed within partner platforms, SiteMinder is extending hotels’ reach across the emerging booking landscape, converting AI-led demand into direct and indirect booking opportunities.

The announcement comes at a pivotal moment for the industry. SiteMinder’s Changing Traveller Report 2026, the world’s largest consumer survey on accommodation plans and preferences, recently found that eight in ten travellers now want AI assistance during their booking journey, a shift that is reshaping how hotels connect with their guests, and one that SiteMinder’s latest platform expansions are designed to meet.

“Navigating the shifts in how travellers find and book hotels is what SiteMinder was built to do,” says Sankar Narayan, CEO and Managing Director at SiteMinder. “As AI-driven hotel discovery accelerates, we are expanding Demand Plus and Channels Plus to give properties on our platform new ways to be found and convert demand across these emerging pathways. For hoteliers, that means being present and bookable at every new point of discovery, and that advantage will only grow.”

Sanjay Vakil, CEO and Co-Founder of DirectBooker, added: “AI is creating a new front door for hotel discovery, and every hotel deserves to be found through it. SiteMinder has pioneered hotel distribution at every major turn, and this partnership extends that leadership into the age of AI-driven travel. SiteMinder’s partnership supports DirectBooker’s goal of ensuring hotels are the primary beneficiaries of this shift: capturing a new generation of demand while keeping the guest relationship exactly where it belongs.”

Norman Arundel, Director of Hotels and Resorts at EVT, a leading hotel and entertainment group with properties across Australia, New Zealand and Europe, welcomed the announcement: “We are watching guest search behaviour evolve in real time, and the direction is unmistakable: AI is becoming part of how travellers find and choose where to stay. The imperative for hotels is to be discoverable in that environment, surfacing the right information at the right moment. At EVT, we see this as one of the most significant opportunities in hospitality right now, and it’s encouraging to see technology partners actively enabling hotels to not only be found, but booked, wherever guests are searching.”

Both product expansions are powered by Model Context Protocol (MCP), a technical standard that gives AI platforms access to live hotel data in real time, rather than relying on static or outdated information.

With 53,000 hotels, 2.5 million rooms and more than 300 million room nights processed annually across 150 countries, SiteMinder has built one of the hospitality industry’s largest and most connected distribution platforms. That scale, together with its hotel commerce infrastructure, positions SiteMinder to help hotels participate in the AI era of travel distribution.