Owner Holidays listing site

[Nigel Goodwin]

Funny story - I used to work with a husband and wife, the husband booked a holiday for a week at Lake Tahoe USA, luxury place, he waxed lyrical about it.

A year later, his wife told me that he had mixed up weekly and daily prices - he thought he was getting it for $1100 a week, in fact he discovered after booking it was $1100 a day.

Ouch. She wasn't happy.

[e-richard]

Nigel, I think you are on an errant path.

Take a sample of 20 different owners with 1-5 properties each and I'll show you 35 different pricing mechanisms with another 40 variants and exceptions (No exaggeration!!).

PIMS will handle many of these, but not all, SuperControl will do a different sub set and so on.

Since its your stated goal to act as an advertising platform and not a booking platform which brings the complexities of pricing and convoluted algorithms for accepting bookings, then I think you would be wise to spend your energies on the maximising the coverage for our properties and let the owner do the final quotation. Perhaps the listing site can attempt an approximation, and make sure to be 100% transparent about what it is.

Other potential users of your site here on LMH may have different views and be keen to have accurate pricing in the advertising portal, but I can guarantee that will limit your potential audience or worse it will divert your attentions into realms that may severely delay the launch of your website.

[Nigel Goodwin]

Nigel, I think you are on an errant path.

Let me try to position myself better.

The perpetual conflict in software is between complexity and ease of use.

If you implement everything which anybody asks for, you will end up with a nightmare nobody can use.

TA/HA etc. have over simplistic pricing models, so their quotes are often (or always) wrong. We can do better than that.

If I took the full superset of all booking systems and all the needs of owners, it would be too complicated and would be difficult to use. That is not my aim. I will not be doing a 100% solution.

So I am looking for a middle road, something which, as you say, is an approximation, but a better approximation than TA/HA.

I do not have a high priority for allowing flexible extra costs - so owners cannot specify their own customised cost for cot/pet/cooked breakfast/extra linen change/personal massage service. That is for discussion between owner and guest.

That is something you can specify in SuperControl (not sure about other booking systems), but will not be high on my priorities. Maybe one day, but not in 2016. I myself have extra charges for pets and cots and high chair specified in my SuperControl properties.

What exactly that approximation is will emerge, partly through discussion with booking system vendors such as yourself. But certainly it includes different rates for different periods, I already support that. Probably I will also support different weekend pricing.

I am very familiar, with my background in technical computing for the oil and gas industry, with the difficulty of interfacing to a multitude of different data standards, and translating between them.

I am also familiar with the issue of how to implement flexible data models. Shell did good work on this in the 1990's, when looking at how to integrate data for offshore platforms from different design companies. Compared with that, pricing models are trivial. Trivially completely incompatible ha ha ! Same problem, just on a smaller scale. I did some consulting work advising Chevron USA on exactly this issue some years ago. Every offshore project had different data standards, even within Chevron.

[Nigel Goodwin]

that may severely delay the launch of your website.

The website is already launched, owners are entering properties.

Of course, the launch of the advertising of the web site is only just starting.

Of course, the web site will gradually be changing and improving.

Of course, I don't want 1000 owners entering properties on day one.

Timing of software/web sites is always tricky.

Delaying until everything is perfect has killed many new companies.

[FelicityA]

The website is already launched, owners are entering properties.

Of course, I don't want 1000 owners entering properties on day one

re. The fear of 1000 owners descending - Should we wait a while, Nigel, or go ahead?

[Nemo]

Well done Nigel, nothing gained by sitting back, and sometimes you just need to go out there and try. If you edit the thread title to include your listing site name, we can find it in a search in the future; always useful, hopefully with lots of positive news.

[Dotty]

Good initiative Nigel. I hope it does well. I'm travelling now, but will take a look when I get back and put adding a listing on my to-do list.

[Nigel Goodwin]

If you edit the thread title to include your listing site name,

Thanks. Done.

[Nigel Goodwin]

re. The fear of 1000 owners descending - Should we wait a while, Nigel, or go ahead?

Three or four people have entered their properties, without any help from me, so it can't be too bad.

My main worry is that there is a major problem and I have to ask people to enter their properties again. but I think at worst you will just have to re - enter part of your data (such as complex pricing and pricing periods). So my advice is to enter properties now, add some images which will appear on the featured listing, but maybe don't go too far down the road of entering pricing periods and details.

Of course, if you have an iCals interface somewhere, you can import from iCals right now without manually entering availability dates.

From feedback yesterday, I am currently implementing a multi currency feature. You can already view prices in different currencies, I am extending to allow owners to input prices in different currencies. At present it uses the default of GBP. Should be finished and tested by tomorrow. It should automatically bring in conversion rates from yahoo.

I am also simplifying the way owners log as they enter properties. It is trying to be a bit too clever at the moment. At present you can logon without any manual intervention, but I have to manually authorise properties, which I think is sensible.

[NeatandPicky]

Thank you and good luck with this impressive venture, Nigel.

[AndrewH]

Three or four people have entered their properties, without any help from me, so it can't be too bad.

My main worry is that there is a major problem and I have to ask people to enter their properties again.

I am sure you will tell us in your own good time when your site is ready to take listings?

[Nigel Goodwin]

Maybe I wasn't clear. It is ready now.

[COYS]

I'm in your corner Nigel. Let's get his show on the road.

[Nigel Goodwin]

I'm in your corner Nigel. Let's get his show on the road.

Thanks. To adapt your tag line:

This time next year Rodney, we'll all be millionaires.

[ellerhow]

Good on you Nigel. We will give it a go!