I agree with you Darren, surely a IT expert should be able to write a programme which deletes a holiday once there is no availability as it would be pretty time consuming to delete each holiday manually from the database?

I think that displaying travel offers that don’t exist is a sure fire way to make consumers feel very negative about your brand. I know I was getting frustrated last week trying to get onto the Travelodge site to find £9 rooms in their Winter Sale. I kept getting the server busy message but I persevered and did book a clutch of £9 rooms.

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Ahh, the good old “why can’t you just…”.

All of our website offers are loaded manually, and then the staff which load them monitor the allocation. Once it’s all gone, they update the offer – obviously this can’t be done when nobody is in the office!

Certainly for our websites, it would have a huge impact on our IT systems, to constantly monitor each offer we have loaded to see if it’s available. We are quite unique in having our availability searches actually checking live availability instead of cached (effectively a list which could be 24 hours old) availability. If we used a cache, constantly checking wouldn’t have a huge impact, but then our searches wouldn’t be showing true availability, and customers would become frustrated further down the booking path.

You are quite right that it is frustrating, and we have been trying to find a viable solution for a while now. It’s proving quite difficult to be able to satisfy both criteria!

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I know it’s the same thing but I am still seeing ‘special offers’ on travel websites for May 2008! Villa companies seem to be the worst culprits and 99.9% of them don’t even have their offers in RSS format. Dumb, dumb and even dumber!

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Darren

Travel technology is not super fast or modern when it comes to current systems. The “holiday” side is the same base system as what we where using in the early 80′s. The systems are generally very good, but they do not talk to the God Microsoft. Therefore what you see on the internet is not live. Even worse from a customer point of view is when companies take bookings and then reject them. (This is not happening so much now).

Most of the late search systems you use work like this. They go to each of the 20 or so travel systems in turn and down loaded the information. Then they format this for Microsoft and post on the web. As you can see even if it took 10 minutes per system (it is closer to 30) then it would be 200 minutes before the information is correct again so what your looking at can be hours out of date.

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I’ve seen those kind of screens over here in Sweden too and have been amazed over the speed they’ve written all the codes and such. Very old looking yes. 80′s def. Time to change all that. Or maybe the travel agencies will go under? Which will come first? *giggles*

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darren, those ate the most stable operating systems. I don’t see why they would want to “webify” the systems when this will probably kist slow them down.

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@Garri
Been trying to find a simple way to implement the RSS feeds here! The problem is that the offers are all manually loaded, so it’s a pain in the backside to keep the rss up to date as so many people are constantly updating them.

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@Simon
RSS is really stupidly simple to implement. You need to aggregate the offers on 1 page, refreshed every so often, with the perhaps the ones that have gone greyed out and below the fold.

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Darren

Does not matter which travel agency you go to we all use the same systems. Some companies have moved to web based systems. Most independent use specialist technology to make our life easier, while co-op is independent they did not seem to. But even on web based systems in some case that old technology is still behind the scenes powering it. One up for us is in the last year I can only remember one system crashing and that’s was just for couple hours, which of course is why companies keep it as web based systems crash almost monthly.

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On a related but slightly different subject I too have been spending my precious lunch breaks looking for a good deal for Xmas or New Year – why do so may websites offer “cheap wintersun” or best wintersun deals” from £XXX and when you search the cheapest “deal is over £800pp for 7 days?
Does anyone know of any really good cheap wintersun deals still available departing either 24th or 26th? I have spent literally hours chasing rainbows on the we and may have to resort to driving to an agent instead.

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@Garri
For basic websites, yes they are “stupidly simple” to implement. For a site where the offers are loaded in various formats, in changing groups and across multiple pages, across multiple brands, finding the right solution is not so simple, as we have to satisfy 7 different businesses requirements…. and then they’ll go and change them the day after launch anyway!

@Darren
Interesting that you find deals aren’t available online, but are in shops. Ours are all available, and usually cheaper online that in the agents. I guess it just depends on how much time people have to look through things. It’s much easier to give a budget to an Agent and see what they come back with….. or maybe that’s what the websites should do!

“I have £2,000 to spend – show me what you’ve got!” I’ll make a note of that one

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In my youth (Father William) in the agency: Client walks in and says “cheap holiday now please”… Sit down (preferably with cup of tea and prefereably with all the people going, for the really late stuff) fire up the Viewdata set, start at the top and work down to the bottom. A bit old hat and as you say 1980′s, but still reliable and it works – if it isn’t broken, don’t try and fix it. A good travel agent (invariably an independent) (gratuitous plug) will, from doing it all the time, have a feel for what is going, where and at what price and will talk through your “holiday aspirations” before he or she starts. Passing thought: airline booking systems – the GDS systems – date from the early/ mid 80′s and have not changed one iota – indeed, when they tried to update things with mice and other rodent named computer devices, soft fruit named communication devices and other such, the take up was…. well, nil, really. Now, many (internet) online people say their deals are available – they may be – BUT – that’s how you wind up with people booking a beach holiday in Dubai in August, the carribbean in November, October in Tunisia etc etc. A good agent will know what may be cheap – but he or she will also know the reason why it is cheap. What you may be after is not “cheap” at all – what you may be after is “best value” for your hard earned pounds – and the two are not the same…!

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Meant to add – What do you mean “….can’t see this evolving….” This is this wonderful web of ours. Here we have, as I (as do many bricks and mortar agent types) hitting people over the head saying “visit a local travel agent” whilst web types are pulling their hair out. spending megabucks trying to reinvent the wheel. One may say, so a bunch of sad geeks can sit inside all day, never going out, never making time for themselves, let alone interacting with other humans (interact with other humans! God forbid! Why?) – trying to avoid… er… well – what? Tschoch! I don’t know…. No wonder our nation is getting fat and lazy. (Present company excepted, of course) Walk! Darren, walk! You know, fresh air, trees, excercise, b-r-e-a-t-h-e…..

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Darren

Travel Agencies do use web based systems, because we want to. However the Big tour companies do not and that is where the problem is.

@ Tricia… do not forget you can just phone the travel agent and they will do the work and call you back.

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Unfortunately this is not new a story and nowadays many companies especially the hotel travel industries do such type of advertisement in order to get popularity and get more people to get on their website so that they can increase traffic. These advertisements are just like web baiting so that customers can land on their website.

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