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Consider Reliability and Response |
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By Tim Unwin, Pegasus Solutions
Seven hours of lost bookings. Half a week of lost bookings. Fill in the blank for the amount of lost dollars for your operation. Compound that one percent with speed of response, and those lost bookings could become central to your reservations issue. Research suggests that if a Web site doesn�t respond to information requests within four to five seconds, then �poof�, your customer�s gone shopping elsewhere. This expected speed of response also applies to the global distribution systems (GDSs), which are just as attention deficit as your customer. Exceed the response time limits, and you�ll automatically time out. Your replies to shopping and booking requests need to be on their way back to the customer in a fraction of a second, every time, otherwise it�s the disappearing act for your reservations and your business. The common assumption would be that one percent, while not ideal, is pretty good considering the overall volume of shopping and booking requests for hotels. But with today�s technology, 100 percent is not only possible, but should also be the standard. For example, in the fourth quarter of 2007, Pegasus CRS customers using RezView didn�t experience a single service interruption. Additionally, these customers enjoyed 99.997 percent availability for the year and response times averaging under a tenth of a second. With our initial math, that one percent (seven hours a month, three-and-a-half days a year) then becomes .003 percent. Translation: less than half an hour a year (just more than two minutes a month) that you risk missing those bookings. If the industry was capable of that reliability and response a year
ago, then what should we be able to do today with next generation technology
at our fingertips? Instead of accepting the status quo of �pretty good�,
it�s time we shift our priorities to perfection and expect more from our
CRS, thus replacing your reservations with, well, reservations (the good
kind).
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| Contact:
Ariel Herr for Pegasus
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One
percent is admirable, if you�re talking loan interest rates. In terms of
performance figures for your central reservation system (CRS), however,
one percent of down time should give you some reservations (the bad kind).
That small percentage can amount to a colossal seven hours a month, or
more than three-and-a-half days a year.
