I recently had the pleasure to attend my first HEDNA conference in New Orleans (14-16 January) as a newly enrolled member, and I came away impressed with the welcoming friendliness of other delegates (seemingly the largest gathering for a while). I was also fascinated at the quality of the Connectivity Group’s presentation around the Push / Pull hotel distribution model that many of the Hoteliers in the room were visibly grappling with. A lot of work has been done by this HEDNA Group to define and explain the many and various options open to hotels to display availability and price data to the fragmented channels that can help them sell their rooms and secure bookings in their Central Reservation Systems (CRS). Essentially the options are pushing Availability, Room, and Inventory (ARI) data out to those consuming systems that need it or pulling in the shopping requests for rooms as they happen.
Obviously each method will have its own plus and minuses. With push, the workload with search requests is offloaded but the data may not be quite as accurate when the booking is executed. While with Push the hotel can see the shopping traffic but also needs to be able to handle large volumes of shopping messages.
Distributors also need to consider how they want to obtain ARI for their consumers. If the distributor opts for the push method, then it is required to store large amounts of data on its systems. If the distributor opts for the pull method, then it has to go out and get the data – often with a corresponding lag in message response times.
Read full story at: http://hotelmarketing.com/index.php/content/article/four_key_reasons_why_
