

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?<p>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?
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kls
You may find the answer is completely different that what you assume to be the
problem. The problem from your perspective is that you arrive and there is no
availability. To a provider they see that every table in the house /room in
the hotel is booked, as far as a business problem it is a good problems to
have. Most companies over-allocate allotment, for various reasons and deal
with the good problem to have rather than under-allocate and deal with
threatening business problems. Historically overallocation is the only way to
account for things like cancellations and no-shows. Fixing the problem may not
be in the providers interest, making it in the providers interest is the issue
that you have to solve for.

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ajayr
Online booking engines can be easily customized to handle over-booking. The
issue I'm looking at is that online booking engines don't have accurate (and
real-time) supply picture today. If this was available, it would become
possible to make reservations without the need to get confirmations from the
provider.

Take sites like froomz.com or venuecricket.com, for instance. They are online
marketplaces for renting spaces. They have many small-time providers renting
out there dance studios or workshops. If such providers exclusively use the
booking engines provided by the froomz/venuecricket, there are no issues. But
if they also use Outlook to handle offline reservations, then keeping it in
sync with online booking engines becomes a big challenge. You might end up
booking venues only to receive a failed reservation several hours later
resulting in extremely unhappy customers who will likely write bad reviews
about the site and the venue.

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kls
That is the point I am trying to convey most of them don't give exclusivity to
one provider, they provide allotments to many providers and many intentionally
over allot, because they would rather give rain checks and discounts than have
less than optimal utilization of the capacity. They are a lot of middlemen
moving hospitality products, most work on a commission structure and most
receive an allotment that they can fill (it is supposed to be guaranteed, it
never is in practice). These middlemen perform at different efficiencies. Most
hospitality providers try to track their efficiency to effectively manage
allotment, but there is no guarantee of their performance. Therefore,
hospitality providers generally over allot to compensate for this, even if
they used an online system that sells their product, they are not going to
turn away other middlemen, who basically equal a zero up front cost sales
channel. Those other middlemen will have their own systems where they manage
their own allotments.

