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There's actually many things that I hated about travel sites, and then I worked at a "travel tech" company and it changed by perception of the industry as a who

There's actually many things that I hated about travel sites, and then I worked at a "travel tech" company and it changed by perception of the industry as a whole. Part of the issue is the suppliers themselves. Bcom, Expedia, Kayak etc are all at the mercy of what individual hoteliers and airlines report. I've seen data issues where hotels will report little/no inventory, and we investigated the issue and it was on their end (user error, oops). Or, a huge party booked up the hotel, but users were angry because just 24 hours before, we showed N open rooms, and now we have almost nothing. Issues like this happen all the time, and the debate always centered around messaging. We would love to tell users why something is unbookable, but trying to figure out the details with suppliers ended up being near impossible. That being said, OTAs do have their own set of issues to answer for, including misleading messaging, scummy sales tactics, etc.

dvtrn 7y ago
I’ve recently joined travel/hospitality tech company adjacent to but not exactly the same as the core booking segment. What you said about investigating a lack of vacancy coming from the Hotelier/user error I would suspect has to do with poor PMS integration. You probably know some of the same vendor names that I do. For those unfamiliar, think of a Hotel’s PMS system like an ERP platform but for hotel operations and associating guest services with guest billing info. Buy the high-speed WiFi instead of using the slow free WiFi? That goes to the PMS and tells the hotel to bill you for it (if they don’t farm that out to a third-party who bills and remits on their behalf). Anyhow. I’ve come to learn, without naming any of my clients publicly that technology integration in hospitality (I specifically refer to household name hotel brands, not necessarily brands associated with ordering reservations like Expedia and Booking.com) ranges from exceptional but difficult to horrifying but trivial, and a common source of my personal frustrations as a product manager for our specific services (which require integration to these PMS platforms) is incomplete or inaccurate data produced by the property or hotel brand THEMSELVES I feel your frustration.
- jorblumesea 7y ago
  Totally! I agree with everything you've said, their relatively lack of tech sophistication a huge PIA and it causes us daily headaches. In addition, I've noticed that their hardware and software is often terrible, non-performant or buggy. So when we try to interface with them, we need to do hacks like severe rate limiting and long term caching of inventory (sometimes 24+ hours), simply because if we wanted to run at the TPS we run at, they would tip over. This leads to stale inventory on our end, and customer anger. We would love to do everything live (with short term caching), but the suppliers just can't take the load. Just about the only direct call made is the booking one, everything else is stale by some amount. Monitoring/logging is often non-existent, so when you say "hey we're seeing latency" they have no idea how to diagnose or fix. Often, they don't have metrics in place and are unaware that there is latency to begin with. > incomplete or inaccurate data produced by the property or hotel brand THEMSELVES I believe it's largely because the RPC soap calls that many of these integrations use are stateful, so making the same call over and over again can lead to different results. Much of their tech stack is stuck in the 90s/early 2000s, and it shows.

dvtrn 7y ago

I’ve recently joined travel/hospitality tech company adjacent to but not exactly the same as the core booking segment. What you said about investigating a lack of vacancy coming from the Hotelier/user error I would suspect has to do with poor PMS integration. You probably know some of the same vendor names that I do. For those unfamiliar, think of a Hotel’s PMS system like an ERP platform but for hotel operations and associating guest services with guest billing info. Buy the high-speed WiFi instead of using the slow free WiFi? That goes to the PMS and tells the hotel to bill you for it (if they don’t farm that out to a third-party who bills and remits on their behalf). Anyhow. I’ve come to learn, without naming any of my clients publicly that technology integration in hospitality (I specifically refer to household name hotel brands, not necessarily brands associated with ordering reservations like Expedia and Booking.com) ranges from exceptional but difficult to horrifying but trivial, and a common source of my personal frustrations as a product manager for our specific services (which require integration to these PMS platforms) is incomplete or inaccurate data produced by the property or hotel brand THEMSELVES I feel your frustration.

jorblumesea 7y ago
Totally! I agree with everything you've said, their relatively lack of tech sophistication a huge PIA and it causes us daily headaches. In addition, I've noticed that their hardware and software is often terrible, non-performant or buggy. So when we try to interface with them, we need to do hacks like severe rate limiting and long term caching of inventory (sometimes 24+ hours), simply because if we wanted to run at the TPS we run at, they would tip over. This leads to stale inventory on our end, and customer anger. We would love to do everything live (with short term caching), but the suppliers just can't take the load. Just about the only direct call made is the booking one, everything else is stale by some amount. Monitoring/logging is often non-existent, so when you say "hey we're seeing latency" they have no idea how to diagnose or fix. Often, they don't have metrics in place and are unaware that there is latency to begin with. > incomplete or inaccurate data produced by the property or hotel brand THEMSELVES I believe it's largely because the RPC soap calls that many of these integrations use are stateful, so making the same call over and over again can lead to different results. Much of their tech stack is stuck in the 90s/early 2000s, and it shows.