Control flow management in the hospitality industry
Alicia Revello, Abdel Obaid, Anne Marie Amja · 2012
This work was done in the context of information exchange between websites for online bookings of air tickets, hotel rooms and car rentals, such as travelocity.com, expedia.com, etc. These sites obtain their data from hotel data providers or specific centers (known as Central Reservation Systems (CRS)), airline companies and car rental agencies. The fundamental problem related to these sites is the amount of information received and their validity in time. Due to the new and complex optimization process of the Revenue Management System (RMS) within the CRS, the Online Travel Agencies (OTA) face flow congestion when the CRSs, which contain thousands of products, update large amount of inventory. This congestion could affect present and future reservations with the wrong rate or availability. We tackle this problem by proposing a solution to control the flow between the OTAs and the CRSs; first prioritizing the updates by creating a demand calendar in the RMS and second by creating a Flow Control System that will reduce the message flow and control data losses.