There are many travel sites on the internet which hotel properties can make their inventory available on but in order to do so must manually maintain that availability on. This results in either too much time spent by the property owner maintaining this inventory or reduction and/or loss of inventory available to sell by the travel site because the property lacks the admin resources to constantly maintain this inventory.

This standard is proposed as a standard way for PMSs' to submit inventory availability to travel sites who allow properties to manually maintain room inventories online. The programming time required to execute to this would be trivial compared to the benefits to all parties. Many PMSs' offer partial solutions or custom programming options but what is needed {and to my knowledge doesn't exist} is a standard so ANY PMS vendor can write one interface to upload to ANY travel site.

It's intent is to duplicate the functionality provided by the current GDS infrastructure far more efficiently by capitalizing on the inherent advantages of the internet. This initial draft is intended only as a starting point. I have done this simply because there is an obvious, crying need for it and I know of no one else who is. If anyone out there wants to take over the moderation I will HAPPILY turn it over. Perhaps and industry association or someone in the educational sector? Whoever does should be "agenda-free" in terms of PMS/travel-site/hotel interests. I fit that category in that although I do have interest in a hotel {which is why, BTW I'm doing this in the first place} , my primary income and interest is on other internet projects. My involvement with the hotel business over the past year or so literally SCREAMS that someone needs to do this, so here it is.

Since someone will undoubtedly ask, XML is not mentioned because I don't believe all the vendors involved are ready to implement nearly as fast as they would be this admittedly rudimentary solution. {this is evidenced by the fact that most PMS vendors are not now HITIS compliant} This industry needs a solution which is programmatically practical to implement NOW. If I'm wrong, outstanding. In any event, the work done here will lay the foundation for XML when the majority is ready for it.
Benefits to travel site:

• Accuracy of data: If the property fails to maintain the data you all know what happens and it ain't good.
• Additional properties: you get this two ways: First, there are X number of properties who would list with you but the constant manual maintenance is too much hassle and/or expense.Second, participating PMS vendors will list this as a feature showing all the additional places a hotel can list their inventory.  So, any hotel on that PMS automatically gets a list of travel sites they can EASILY list their data on.
• Travel sites, please note: there is nothing to prevent this standard from being used to allow you to offer architecturally identical services such as: car rentals, marina and rv space rentals theatre, sport, music event seating, etc. etc. etc.

Benefits to PMS:

• Additional feature to offer to hotels: PMSs' that don't offer this will be at a disadvantage to those who do.
• Write one interface: instead of writing an interface for each travel site or forcing the hotel to go the manual route.

Benefits to Lodging Properties: 
  No more manual maintenance of inventory
  Make your inventory available in more places on the internet with no manual upkeep
  Phase II Benefits

Implementation - PMS

The PMS vendor would create an export routine which would work in full or partial modes. {ideally, some for of checksum would be employed to ensure the integrity of partial "uploads". The uploads would be travel site specific in terms of price and quantity. So only one additional table would be required in your data structure containing the following:
 

Some efficiency has been sacrificed for ease of implementation. Examples are shown for e-mail and FTP uploads. Whether either are both are used will be up to the travel sites and PMSs'.

The travel site specific export product would contain: Date/RoomType/RoomQuantity/Price, I.E.

0616012QNS1512900 fixed length

061601,2QNS,15,12900 comma delimited

In the interest of simplicity, full uploads could be restricted to once a week, partials to once every 3 hours.

Implementation - Travel Site

Provide integration routine via e-mail or ftp for the file as outlined in the PMS section.

For each travel site the lodging property elected to participate in, they would create all the static lodging property information one-time the way they do now

I've set up a public newsgroup at http://www.delphi.com/hotelinv for open discussion which will hopefully lead to rapid agreement and implementation of a final version which will be profitable to all parties. As details are agreed upon by a majority, I'll update this site with the consensus {until someone else wants to take this over}