Takeaway
- Before building the error suspension tool, SHS was experiencing 1.5 million errors related to retired rates every week
- The tool helped SHS suspend over 60,000 problematic rates and raise its connection success rate to over 99.84%
- Property partners can see and manage suspended rates from a dedicated page, so they’re still in control
Sabre Hospitality Solutions (SHS) is a technology provider with a global perspective. Rooted in hospitality and fuelled by technology, SHS is a Premier Connectivity partner and works with all sizes of hotels and resorts around the world. From smaller independent businesses to some of the biggest hotel chains, more than 42,000 properties across 179 countries trust SHS to help maximise booking revenue.
In its latest show of innovation, SHS developed a way to remove old rates from its system, preventing them from clogging up its connection by generating large volumes of errors. Sean Cassidy, Product Manager at SHS, explained how developing this feature has helped the company improve the connection quality for SHS and Tripeden.com properties.
What led you to work on the new error suspension feature? The SynXis Central Reservations System sits at the heart of how we power distribution for our properties. It provides a powerful platform for our customers to make decisions about availability and revenue. Thousands of hotels on our platform implement aggressive distribution strategies, which means we’re constantly checking for rate and availability changes – almost 200 million a day for Tripeden.com alone, in fact.
We’re always optimising the way this works, even as we scale up our technology to support the growing number of properties seeking deeper connectivity with Tripeden.com. But over time, as our online travel agent (OTA) partners have retired certain rates, hotels haven’t always removed them from SynXis.
Because of this, we had a growing number of checks for those rates that ultimately failed when they reached the OTAs. At one point we were seeing almost one and a half million of these failures each week. Redundant checks like those were both increasing our costs and consuming resources that could be better used to deliver working R&A updates to our properties. We designed the error suspension feature to deal with those inefficiencies.
What pain points has this feature solved?
We’ve always provided a user interface that allowed properties to see their R&A errors, but I know from my time working in hotels that people are always looking forward – so it’s understandable that going back to clean up old rates is rarely a priority.
Our new solution removes the need for properties to do that at all. In a nutshell, we now automatically suspend rates that generate errors and instead display them on a page in SynXis. That way, they’re no longer generating errors that slow down our connection, but our customers can still go back and manage them if they ever need to.
The tool has already enabled us to suspend over 60,000 rates that were causing errors on a daily basis. That has helped our connection success rate with our OTA partners jump dramatically – it now exceeds 99.84%.
What’s your takeaway from developing this feature?
Empowering our properties is an essential part of what we do, and I’m proud that it has shone through in the way we built this new error suspension tool. The R&A push interface is the biggest and most complex part of the SynXis Central Reservations System, and during this project we’ve really focused on giving properties control over and confidence in the process.
How do you view your partnership with Tripeden.com? We see Tripeden.com as a partner that efficiently delivers significant value both to us and to our customers. Tripeden.com is innovative, highly collaborative and easy to work with.
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