In the digital travel industry, OTAs are essential for managing bookings, but they can face outages. Understanding and effectively responding to these outages is vital for maintaining smooth operations and customer satisfaction.
Understanding OTA Outages
An OTA outage is a temporary failure or disruption in the OTA's online services. This can impact booking processes, rate updates, inventory management, and customer interactions. Outages can be caused by a variety of factors:
Technical Glitches:
The most common cause of OTA outages is technical glitches. These can range from server overloads to software bugs. As OTAs handle vast amounts of data and transactions, a minor technical issue can escalate quickly, affecting multiple users and services.
Maintenance and Updates:
Sometimes, OTAs schedule maintenance or updates which can lead to temporary downtime. While these are typically planned during off-peak hours, they can still affect accessibility.
External Factors:
External factors such as internet outages, natural disasters, or power failures can indirectly affect OTA platforms.
How to act during an OTA outage
Hotel Link is committed to keeping its hotel clients informed during OTA outages, whether planned or unexpected. Here's how the process works to ensure seamless communication and minimal disruption:
Immediate Notification:
Whenever an OTA informs Hotel Link about a planned or ongoing unexpected outage, we take immediate action to notify our hotel clients. This is done through:
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Email Notifications: All hotels connected to the affected OTA will receive email notifications detailing the nature and expected duration of the outage.
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Extranet Posts: Notifications are also posted on our extranet, providing an additional layer of communication.
OTA outages can vary in length, ranging from a few minutes to several hours. The OTA in question will inform Hotel Link about both the start and end times of the outage.
Post-Outage Procedure
OTAs will confirm when all services are back online, and normal communication for reservations can resume. After the outage concludes, the OTA will provide Hotel Link with a detailed summary of all bookings that were created, altered, or cancelled during the outage period.
To ensure that no reservation is overlooked, we proactively restart our booking retrieval processes. This includes reattempting any booking retrieval requests that were initially made during the outage window, to ensure that all reservation information is accurately and completely updated.
This generally describes what happens, but each OTA has its own specific procedures. In some cases, hotels may need to actively participate by re-saving the mapping page of the affected OTA, or by cross-referencing bookings in the OTA's extranet with those in Hotel Link. This ensures that no bookings are missed in the event that the OTA's automatic retrieval process fails.