Seventy-thousand to one. That’s the ratio of queries to actual bookings in the travel industry. This huge number of queries puts tremendous demands on reservation technology. If your system can’t respond to these queries fast enough, you could be losing bookings.
Find out how hetras broke the speed barrier in this issue of hetras hummingbird.
We’re always happy to hear from you.
Best regards from the Austrian Alps,
Keith Gruen
Find out how hetras broke the speed barrier in this issue of hetras hummingbird.
We’re always happy to hear from you.
Best regards from the Austrian Alps,
Keith Gruen
The look-to-book ratio is now approaching 70,000 to 1 in the travel industry. This means that an average of 70,000 people will query your rates and availability before a single person completes a booking. These 70,000 people do not all query your own website. Many of them query online travel agencies and global distribution systems where your hotel is listed. Some of the 70,000 are not “people” at all, but rather machines.
In any case, to keep up with all those queries, a hotel management system needs a lightning-fast quoting system, especially if you maintain a single-image inventory. After all, if you can’t deliver a quote fast enough, you may lose a potential booking. Nobody has the patience to wait anymore.
So how fast is fast enough? Traditionally the answer was one second. The moment a query arrives with an arrival date, departure date and possibly other criteria as well, the hotel system should generate a quote within one second. This response still has to be sent via the internet to the end-user or machine and that adds extra time.
However, one second is no longer satisfactory. As the number of hotels online grows and the selection of packages, options and offers increases, each individual query must be faster than ever before. Industry experts recommend 500 milliseconds, or half a second. hetras set an even more ambitious goal: 250 milliseconds. In our initial tests, hetras exceeded even this goal. Some queries are answered as fast as one tenth of a second and the system could be still further optimized.
So how do we achieve such unbelievable speeds? One of the secrets lies in the use of an in-memory database. Querying a computer disk is always slower than querying computer memory. So we put much of the quote-relevant data into memory and synchronize the disk database with the memory database. Built-in caching products from database vendors don’t give you the fine control necessary for really boosting the speed, which is why we use a product called eXtremeDB from McObject. This technology was originally used in real-time military applications. And now, for the first time, in hotel applications as well.
In any case, to keep up with all those queries, a hotel management system needs a lightning-fast quoting system, especially if you maintain a single-image inventory. After all, if you can’t deliver a quote fast enough, you may lose a potential booking. Nobody has the patience to wait anymore.
So how fast is fast enough? Traditionally the answer was one second. The moment a query arrives with an arrival date, departure date and possibly other criteria as well, the hotel system should generate a quote within one second. This response still has to be sent via the internet to the end-user or machine and that adds extra time.
However, one second is no longer satisfactory. As the number of hotels online grows and the selection of packages, options and offers increases, each individual query must be faster than ever before. Industry experts recommend 500 milliseconds, or half a second. hetras set an even more ambitious goal: 250 milliseconds. In our initial tests, hetras exceeded even this goal. Some queries are answered as fast as one tenth of a second and the system could be still further optimized.
So how do we achieve such unbelievable speeds? One of the secrets lies in the use of an in-memory database. Querying a computer disk is always slower than querying computer memory. So we put much of the quote-relevant data into memory and synchronize the disk database with the memory database. Built-in caching products from database vendors don’t give you the fine control necessary for really boosting the speed, which is why we use a product called eXtremeDB from McObject. This technology was originally used in real-time military applications. And now, for the first time, in hotel applications as well.
Speed: The hummingbird is one of the fastest animals in the animal kingdom in relation to its body size
Efficiency: The hummingbird can travel 800 kilometers on 2 grams of nectar
Flexibility: The hummingbird can fly in all possible directions, even sideways and backwards
Remarkable Memory: The hummingbird can find specific flower patches even after one year in captivity
Speed, efficiency, flexibility, memory. Need we say more about why we chose the hummingbird as the symbol of hetras? Besides, both hetras and the hummingbird look good too.
Efficiency: The hummingbird can travel 800 kilometers on 2 grams of nectar
Flexibility: The hummingbird can fly in all possible directions, even sideways and backwards
Remarkable Memory: The hummingbird can find specific flower patches even after one year in captivity
Speed, efficiency, flexibility, memory. Need we say more about why we chose the hummingbird as the symbol of hetras? Besides, both hetras and the hummingbird look good too.
The power of the hotel review sites such as Tripadvisor and Holidaycheck is undeniable. The millions of guest reviews and ratings make these sites a necessary stopping point for many people before booking a hotel.
No longer do hotels need to be paranoid only about those few anonymous “expert” hotel critics. Now every guest is a potential expert and can make their voice heard.
Some hoteliers try to fight this trend and even manipulate the ratings. But it’s a losing battle. The review sites are constantly getting smarter about filtering out fake reviews – both good and bad. One thing is certain: if they catch someone trying to manipulate the ratings, they will find a way to punish that hotel in the ratings.
So what’s the best strategy for a hotelier to deal with this new phenomenon? Other than the obvious – treat your guests well and be honest in your property descriptions – there are few steps you can take to improve your rating in the eyes of your potential website booker.
No longer do hotels need to be paranoid only about those few anonymous “expert” hotel critics. Now every guest is a potential expert and can make their voice heard.
Some hoteliers try to fight this trend and even manipulate the ratings. But it’s a losing battle. The review sites are constantly getting smarter about filtering out fake reviews – both good and bad. One thing is certain: if they catch someone trying to manipulate the ratings, they will find a way to punish that hotel in the ratings.
So what’s the best strategy for a hotelier to deal with this new phenomenon? Other than the obvious – treat your guests well and be honest in your property descriptions – there are few steps you can take to improve your rating in the eyes of your potential website booker.
- Don’t force your website visitors to leave your site and go to Tripadvisor & co. to check your ratings. Who knows if these visitors will ever return to your site? Instead display guest comments and ratings directly on your own website. Not just the good ones, but bad ones as well. In fact, you might want to post all reviews in their entirety. Show the overall rating (“our guests give us an average satisfaction rating of 8.9 out of 10 this month”). A good example is Prizehotel.
- Provide a link to Tripadvisor or Holidaycheck on your website. Make sure that the link opens in a new window or tab. That way your own website remains open.
- Use a Tripadvisor or Holidaycheck widget to embed their reviews on your site. This gives your visitor assurance that you are really showing all the reviews and not picking and choosing.
- Use the opportunity – where available – to explain and respond to bad reviews.
- Use a neutral rating service that collects your reviews after each stay and embeds them on your site. This adds trust and reliability to your reviews. An example of this in the German-speaking world is Customer Alliance.
- Choose a hotel management system that automatically sends out a post-stay survey via email to your guests, posts the responses on your website, and tallies and summarizes the results and trends. As the hotel manager, you can still filter out the inappropriate comments from your website.
Are you an experienced database administrator? How about a top developer in either Java or .net? Are you a junior developer with a strong interest in hotel technology? In any of these cases, we’d like you to consider hetras.
You’ll be challenged every day to break new ground and devise new strategies. Most of what you’ll be working on is cutting-edge technology. In fact, you will be learning something new almost every day. You’ll be proud to be part of the team responsible for the product that is capturing the hotel world by storm.
And when the working day is over, have a beer - or whatever your favorite drink is - with the team in the idyllic alpine resort of Zell am See. After all, you’ll be living where other people only go on holiday.
Check out all our job descriptions, including database administrator.
You’ll be challenged every day to break new ground and devise new strategies. Most of what you’ll be working on is cutting-edge technology. In fact, you will be learning something new almost every day. You’ll be proud to be part of the team responsible for the product that is capturing the hotel world by storm.
And when the working day is over, have a beer - or whatever your favorite drink is - with the team in the idyllic alpine resort of Zell am See. After all, you’ll be living where other people only go on holiday.
Check out all our job descriptions, including database administrator.
Would you like to hear the history of how hetras got started? Do you want know what really sets hetras apart? Do you want to know what Otto Lilienthal, Steve Jobs and Richard Branson have to do with our company? Read all about this and more in the new hetras brochure. Ready for download today.
As a hosted software-as-a-service product, hetras has to be up and running all the time. Not 95% of the time. Not 99% of the time. But as close to 100% as possible. There can be no downtime with hetras. There can be no reindexing time. There can be no interruption due to upgrades. The global hotel industry runs 24 hours. To put it simply, downtime and software errors must become a thing of the past.
So how do we do this at hetras? Before anything goes live, it gets tested. Not only by people, but by machines. After all, there are almost one thousand web services and millions of permutations that need to be tried and tested. But we don’t just test before a release. We run every single test every night of the year. When the programmers come to the office in the morning, they get an email describing exactly any new errors that need fixing. Only when these tests reveal zero errors, can a new version be deployed.
Of course even before we run these nightly tests, our programmers test their new code independently, known as unit testing. We also run load testing to ensure that hetras runs simultaneously not only for one thousand hotels but with one hundred thousand hotels or more. And we organize user acceptance testing, to make sure our user interfaces are logical, intuitive and easy.
Testing and fine-tuning for performance is an ongoing process. It’s a process we rank very high at hetras.
So how do we do this at hetras? Before anything goes live, it gets tested. Not only by people, but by machines. After all, there are almost one thousand web services and millions of permutations that need to be tried and tested. But we don’t just test before a release. We run every single test every night of the year. When the programmers come to the office in the morning, they get an email describing exactly any new errors that need fixing. Only when these tests reveal zero errors, can a new version be deployed.
Of course even before we run these nightly tests, our programmers test their new code independently, known as unit testing. We also run load testing to ensure that hetras runs simultaneously not only for one thousand hotels but with one hundred thousand hotels or more. And we organize user acceptance testing, to make sure our user interfaces are logical, intuitive and easy.
Testing and fine-tuning for performance is an ongoing process. It’s a process we rank very high at hetras.
