Pegasus Solutions debuted the Enhanced Shopping Transaction (EST) as part of its ongoing ShoppingNG initiative to improve how hotels are merchandised. The newest transaction development improves the efficiency of rate and availability requests from distributors to reduce excessive look-to-book ratios created by aggressive online shopping, Pegasus said.
Generally, distributors send many single property availability transactions, which return detailed information for a Website’s first display. However, this leads to excessively high look-to-book ratios, and can degrade the performance of suppliers’ central reservation systems (CRSs) that are ill-equipped to deal with the volume of single property availability requests, Pegasus said.
The EST actually enhances the transaction so responses include full room, rate and policy details, making it effectively the same as a set of single property availability responses without the pressure of several individual requests on the CRS.
“Evolution always has unintended side effects. For our industry, the popularization of new channels that make hotel information instantly available has significantly changed consumer shopping behavior. A new generation of aggressive shoppers requires next generation shopping tools,” said Mike Kistner, CEO of Pegasus Solutions. “ShoppingNG addresses the fundamental reasons for the plumbing clogs created by the savvy and aggressive travel shopper with solutions like the Enhanced Shopping Transaction.”
Other ShoppingNG enhancements have included the Daily Error Report to provide insight into errors being returned from a supplier to a distributor, which greatly reduced errors and look-to-book ratios in beta testing. Cache enhancements allow suppliers to set configuration settings at both the SGA and property level, improving cache hit ratios. And finally, Enriched Single Availability has allowed suppliers to send additional fields and attributes such as bed types, formatted cancellation policies and child ages that enrich the rate information for a potential guest.
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