Discl: Held IRL 3.99% and in SM

@mikebrisy , was rather surprised with the market reaction to this announcement to be honest. Apart from today’s ASX announcement on Mews, SDR also announced on 12 May 2026, the deepening of its strategic partnership with Zucchetti, the largest hotel technology provider in Italy. 

Zucchetti Partnership Deepening

Zucchetti has a reasonable sized customer base in Italy, but it looks different from Mews in that (1) the Property Management System (PMS) is only one of a hodge podge of software that Zuchetti sells vs Mews which looks like hotel based (2) Zucchetti appears to not be entirely hotel based, but rather “hospitality”-based. 

Both Mews and Zucchetti will compete head on with SDR’s Little Hotelier offering and in the “Revenue Management” space. 

At face value, essentially, both partnerships:

• Are not new, as SDR looks to have partnered with them for some time
• Integrate SDR’s distribution capabilities into their respective PMS platforms 

Zucchetti will integrate its Central Reservations System, Vertical Booking, into SDR, joining Zucchetti’s internet booking engine, Simple Booking, which has been integrated into SDR since 2016

With Mews, SDR’s distribution capability will be embedded natively within the Mews Operating System, marking the first time that hotels of any size can access the industry’s largest distribution network without leaving the platform their property runs on. This looks like a much more embedded solution vs Zucchetti, which sounds like a regular 3rd party integration.

Have now changed my thinking slightly around how I view SDR, with these PMS integrations, and have re-jigged the previous diagram to the following:

• Fully agree with @mikebrisy , that the integrations really further cements SDR’s “core infrastructure moat” around Distribution, and that this is a more-or-less complete distribution architecture
• The integrations means the SDR Distribution capabilities becomes an integral part of the Mews and Zuchetti PMS, as if it were one - that is very sticky integration as SDR really has no rival offering the same frictionless distribution breadth and depth
• It could also force other PMS software vendors to think about jumping onboard being “SiteMinder Powered” to remain competitive - if this happens, it would another flywheel in the making but on the PMS-end instead - that would be very interesting indeed.

On the risks flagged by @mikebrisy :

Channel Conflict - I don’t think this is too much of an issue as Mews and Zuchetti are both PMS’ and SDR, other than through Little Hotelier, has not positioned itself as a PMS. And there has been very little SDR focus on LittleHotelier as a driver of revenue. The only area of overlap is in Revenue Management. I would argue that with SDR’s tighter integration of Revenue Management to Distribution, and assuming that Revenue Management is a separate option in both Mews and Zuchetti (it may not be), the risk is more that PMS customers would move to SDR’s Dynamic Revenue Plus, instead of the other way round.

Relationship Dilution - I actually think this is net positive for SDR rather than a dilution. SDR does not compete as a PMS. But the PMS' do not have strong distribution conectivity. I actually think this opens up the rest of the non-existing SDR customers on both Mews and Zuchetti to now jump onboard SD’s Channel-related capabilities, simply because it makes sense, and the integration removes friction. If this occurs, we could see an uptick in the SDR new hotel count and/or transaction revenue rather than dilution. And it is a nice win-win because no one would exit Mews or Zuchetti to Little Hotelier - that would be a step backward in capabilty for the hotel I suspect.

First Partner Signal - an interesting one. The keyword in the Mews announcement is “embedded” vs “integrated” in the Zuchetti announcement, indicating that Mews is a new capability. Which is probably what got the market a bit excited. I actually think we will see PMS’ going SiteMinder Powered one by one - that would be very exciting indeed.

Suspect it will be hard to distill and attribute the precise revenue cause and effect directly to the PMS integrations. A compromise will be to (1) compare Employee Cost - if this is flat, as I expect, then these capabilities are just BAU cost, a good thing - this will be FY26 and (2) above trend transaction revenue growth and Hotel additions - this will be 1HFY27.

But fully agree, this is thesis reaffirming. Might be a bit too early to say that this could be “thesis expanding” if the PMS integrations do take off. It will then all drip into greater transaction throughput, higher Gross Booking Value and transaction-based revenue.