How Palisis Group / TourCMS improved technical performance by 82% in 6 months.
As one of GetYourGuide’s long-standing Connectivity Partners, Palisis Group (with their Channel Manager product TourCMS) wanted to take their integration to the next level for their customers.
We spoke with Josef Birchler, Head of Sales, and Paul Slugocki, CTO, about how they achieved their GetYourGuide 2021 Premium Partner status.
The Aim: Seamless Booking Experiences
Customers love booking journeys that just work, and our connectivity partners play a critical role in ensuring that a product that a customer sees on our site can be booked by customers.
With dozens of sales channels selling the same product, ensuring a seamless experience - no matter which channel the customer books through - is no easy task.
When a partner is able to reduce errors during the booking process, it increases the number of bookings sent to their clients and keeps customers happy.
The Results: A Transformative 82% Improvement In Error Rates
Palisis Group identified an opportunity to invest in their integration amidst the pandemic, whilst few people were travelling - to give their clients the best platform to accelerate their recovery.
This resulted in a reduction of ‘reserve’ errors, when a customer adds a product to their cart, by a game-changing 82% after implementing new API features offered by GetYourGuide.
For suppliers, this means that Palisis delivers more accurate data about availability to GetYourGuide, allowing clients to drive more revenue from last-minute bookings and reduce customer service tickets.
How: Making Availability Real-Time
According to Slugocki, the two biggest drivers of performance were implementing the ‘Notify Availability Update’ endpoint and updating error messages to be in line with GetYourGuide’s API specification.
GetYourGuide’s innovative ‘Notify Availability Update’ endpoint - which allows reservation systems to alert GetYourGuide when a product is selling, or sold-out, or a previously sold-out product becomes available again - ensures that the availability that the customer sees online is accurate and up-to-date.
Traditionally, APIs from OTAs periodically ask a reservation system how many tickets are left for a product. However, as a product’s availability is only updated at fixed intervals, there are often mismatches of availability between the updates. That leaves the possibility that a customer could try to book a product that’s already sold out.
Implementing the ‘Notify Availability Update’ “greatly improves accuracy of availability, particularly at the last minute which means that travelers can more confidently book last minute tickets online and our clients can benefit from selling their last minute slots.” said Slugocki. This accuracy is vital when someone is trying to book an activity that's happening on the same day, or even the same hour. “By bringing the cut-off time to zero and reducing error rates, it’s possible to generate more revenue through increased leads and conversion,” Birchler added.
⚙️ Technical Note
Palisis had to build a cache to store product mapping information based on GetYourGuide’s API calls. That gave Palisis visibility on the products that GetYourGuide were actively marketing and ensured those products received instant availability changes . They use the relevant product IDs from that cache to source the corresponding product and push the availability to GetYourGuide.
How: Error Messages
GetYourGuide’s API specification contains a series of error messages that should be returned under the relevant scenarios. When GetYourGuide receives a correctly formatted error message from a reservation system, it triggers automated processes that can automatically fix errors and keep products online.
As one of GetYourGuide’s valued connectivity partners, Palisis had some outdated error messages lurking in their system and were not able to benefit from these automatic fixes.
“Once we understood that there were automated processes on GetYourGuide’s side to help identify and resolve errors when we returned the correct messages, it made sense to prioritise their roll-out”. - Slugocki
Implementing these error messages was simple too. The Integrator Portal allowed Palisis to review key technical metrics, test their integration, and view logs to quickly identify where errors were happening. With transparency on the errors and visibility on the impact on client’s revenue, development was prioritized. “It was quite straightforward just to catch those and add the correct response. More specifically, we could tell you exactly why we couldn't return availability.”
Revising the relevant error messages also benefited the rest of the organisation. In addition to automated procedures to resolve some errors, clear and consistent messaging allowed the technical support teams to streamline processes. The remaining support tickets moved more swiftly by isolating the root cause of an issue faster - particularly with third party clients that use Palisis’ channel management capabilities - improving the quality of these integrations.
“The most important outcome of these improvements for us was scalability and the long term investments we made with third party systems. We created much better connections, with more stability, and reduced traffic to our support desk. Our partners told us that they saw massive improvements in connection quality and saw an increase in last-minute bookings.” - Birchler
And how did they track their progress?
Palisis’ API team once again turned to the Integrator Portal. “We were using the portal quite a lot to check on the improvements to our metrics. Watching to see how the changes directly correlated became a little addicting.. It was fascinating to see the improvements, and kept us motivated This is such an easy to use tool for quality assurance by any suppliers or tour operator.” said Birchler.
Who are Palisis Group?
Palisis is the leading technology provider of comprehensive sales and operations solutions for tourism and transportation businesses around the world. Due to its rich experience, specific market knowledge, consumer centricity and process orientation Palisis is the industry technology pacemaker. As your full service provider Palisis supports your business processes and operational procedures with the most efficient and reliable solution available. Today Palisis solutions are successfully and effectively used by customers in over 100 countries around the globe.