Ask HN: Real-time availability calendars in online booking engines | Hacker News Reader

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

1 pointajayr3 comments

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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