Connecting your SiteMinder account to Hotelminder

When a boutique hotel joins Hotelminder we always start with the connection, never with the modules. There is a simple reason for that: every add-on on the shortlist reads live data from your SiteMinder subscription, and if the API handshake is not clean we would rather discover that before you have picked which modules to run than after. This guide walks through the exact steps we run on a scoping call — the same order, the same checkpoints.

What you need before the call

Three things. A SiteMinder administrator account with the permission to generate API keys (usually the property owner or the general manager, occasionally the revenue manager if the property has delegated that permission). The property's SiteMinder property ID — a numeric identifier you can find at the top right of your SiteMinder dashboard. And ten quiet minutes; the flow will be interrupted twice by the SiteMinder confirmation email and once by our own dashboard, and none of those steps benefit from being multitasked.

Step 1 — Generate a scoped API key in SiteMinder

Inside your SiteMinder admin panel, open Settings, then Integrations, then API access. Click Create key. Give the key a name that names the intended module, not something generic — hotelminder-rate-reasoner-01 is better than partner-key, because in six months you will not remember which key belongs to what. Set the scope to the single property that is joining Hotelminder. If you run more than one property on SiteMinder Multi-Property, generate one key per property, not one master key with cross-property access; it makes revocation surgical when a staff member leaves.

Copy the key. SiteMinder shows the plaintext value once — after the confirmation dialog closes it is hashed. Paste it straight into your password manager under the same name you gave the key inside SiteMinder.

Step 2 — Paste into the Hotelminder onboarding wizard

Log into your Hotelminder dashboard at app.mindermod.org. On the onboarding wizard, choose Connect a SiteMinder property, paste the API key into the first field, and paste the property ID into the second. Choose the modules you want to scope for the property — you do not have to activate them yet; scoping is a read-only check that the key has the right permissions for what the module will need. The wizard will run four probes: a rates read, an availability read, a reservations read, and a write test into a sandbox rate plan we spin up under a hidden name.

Step 3 — Verify the handshake

If all four probes pass, the wizard turns the property card green and shows a small handshake summary: SiteMinder plan detected, room types read, rate plans read, restrictions read, and the timestamp of the last successful poll. Screenshot that page — your advisor will ask you to send it before the scoping call ends, and it becomes the first entry in your onboarding record.

If any probe fails, the wizard tells you exactly which permission is missing. The most common one is Reservations read — some SiteMinder plans require the property administrator to opt-in to third-party reservations access under Settings, Data sharing. Toggle it on, wait sixty seconds for SiteMinder to propagate the change, and click Re-probe.

Step 4 — Book the first module pilot

Once the handshake is green, you can activate any module on the shortlist. Every module launches into a pilot pack for the first month — the first month is included with onboarding, no charge, no auto-conversion. You can pause a module at any time from the same dashboard, and pausing revokes only the module-specific scope; the top-level connection stays live.