Hospitality technology company GuestJoy sold to Australian tech giant SiteMinder

Ellex Partner Sven Papp and Counsel Gerda Liik advised the sale of Estonian start-up company GuestJoy to Australian technology giant SiteMinder.

A SiteMinder Partner since 2017, GuestJoy is already a part of the SiteMinder ecosystem and will be fully integrated into the SiteMinder hotel commerce platform following the completion of the acquisition this year.

The acquisition follows the launch of SiteMinder’s next generation platform in April — an all-in-one hotel commerce platform that unifies SiteMinder’s channel management, distribution and booking engine products with real-time market insights, automated payments, website-building capabilities and more than 1500 partner integrations for accommodation providers to grow their businesses online. GuestJoy will further expand SiteMinder’s robust hotel commerce offering, allowing hoteliers to automate and digitize their guest communication, drive upsell revenues, and strengthen direct guest acquisition.

Sankar Narayan, CEO and MD of SiteMinder, said the agreement to acquire GuestJoy builds on a year of strong organic growth following the company’s IPO in 2021.

“We are thrilled to announce SiteMinder’s acquisition of GuestJoy this year. Great technology powers human connection, and this couldn’t be truer for hotel tech. GuestJoy is highly regarded within the hotel tech industry for its simple user experience, seamless guest communication functionalities and integration capabilities, which are essential for the modern hotelier to deliver a winning and profitable guest experience, while also optimizing their booking and ancillary revenues. GuestJoy’s capability to automate and personalize guest communications will allow SiteMinder to offer a fully integrated user experience for our hoteliers, as we continue to deliver on our hotel commerce platform vision,” Sankar Narayan said.

Since 2014, GuestJoy has gained a strong reputation in the industry for its innovative, easy-to-use technology and for delivering high ROI for its customers. Founded by hospitality tech innovators Alar Ülem and Annika Ülem, GuestJoy was created to solve a key unmet need – to make it simpler and faster for hoteliers to communicate directly with their guests and increase customer value via their property management system.

“We know firsthand how distracting and cumbersome unfit technology can be while you are working hard to deliver an impeccable, memorable guest experience. It’s why we set ourselves the mission of designing GuestJoy to be very easy to use, using data-driven intelligence and automation. We also know that seamless, unified technology can transform hotel businesses, and this is why we are so proud that GuestJoy will become a SiteMinder company,” said GuestJoy Co-founder Alar Ülem.

“SiteMinder is unrivalled in its deep feature capabilities in hotel technology, and for its scale of connectivity in the hotel tech market. We can’t wait to join SiteMinder’s vision to bring every hotel into the new era of hotel commerce, by helping hoteliers connect meaningfully with their guests along every step of their accommodation journey,” said GuestJoy Co-founder Annika Ülem.