

Ask HN: Real-time availability calendars in online booking engines? - ajayr

Many online booking engines struggle with one problem: real-time availability. Even well-established services like OpenTable are not immune to it. Ever been in a situation where OpenTable says there are no 7:30 pm reservations available, but when you call the restaurant, they say they can accommodate you?
Businesses find it hard to rely solely on hosted availability calendars (esp. when it is provided by a growing startup). Today, they work around the problem by providing a fraction of their supply to online services while saving the remaining to make bookings in-house.<p>Any suggestions on how to make inroads and provide a reliable availability calendar that serves the needs of businesses as well as provides real-time availability information to online booking engines?
======
blakdawg
I can think of a lot of obstacles:

1\. Competitive intelligence - do I want my competitors to know exactly how
busy I am, and when? No, I don't.

2\. Pricing - do I want to give someone else a cut of all of my sales? No, I
don't. I don't mind doing that a little bit if that's what it takes to do
business - but if some outsider wants a significant piece of all of my
business, my answer is "no".

3\. Local/loyal customers - do I want to be so booked-up with online
(especially if it's discount-focused) business that I can't take care of
regular customers? No.

If your goal is perfect information available at all times, you're headed for
disappointment. You can probably get pretty good information a fair amount of
the time, but you'll have to work at it or pay for it.

