SynXis connection to Webervations and RezOvation

Dear Select Registry members,

Recently, SR sent a membership email stating: “We are aware that RezOvation and Webervations are not going to make the necessary upgrades to interface with SynXis,” the new CRS providing reservation capabilities for the Select Registry website.  
We’re writing to set the record straight: we never said that we were unwilling to provide this link. 

We plan to discuss this some more with Select Registry Executive Director Mike Palmer to learn why Select Registry told their members this innacurate information. Mike seems to have the impression that this would be an “easy few week project” for us and that we could drop everything to start working on it. In fact, based on the links we’ve already built to Expedia and hotels.com, and the one that we’ll shortly be completing with Travelocity, we know that it takes many months of skilled developers’ time to build, test, and launch a live direct connection. But first we need to evaluate this project and then allow a reasonable amount of time to make it happen.

We’d love to hear from you, the ultimate customers of this product. We’ve heard from a number of users who are not sure that they even want to connect via a two-way interface given the SynXis costs. The manual option SynXis provides is much more cost-effective; given that the monthly fees SynXis would charge our customers to use a two-way connection to Webervations or RezOvation are $100, in addition to the $50/month for manual plus transaction fees. Considering that Webervations only had a small annual fee of less than $100, we wonder how many people actually want to move to a product that is going to cost $1,800/yr minimum, with $350 up-front, $50/year IATA fees, transactions fees up to $12, plus travel agent commissions of 10% or merchant commissions more than double that? 

All this to say, if Select Registry member innkeepers don't want to pay for that connection, it doesn’t make any sense for us to build it. Ironically, we at RezOvation and Webervations only recently were made aware of the Select Registry decision to use SynXis. We learned about it from an innkeeper (not from Select Registry) less than two months ago. It wasn’t until the last Friday in September that we actually got a look at the connectivity specification. Typically when there is a connectivity project of this size at hand, a company like us that has so many customers using the current system would be given significant advanced notice to scope the project, schedule development time, talk to customers about their issues and concerns, etc.

As you are all aware, Webervations had been the provider of the Select Registry booking engine for quite some time, allowing folks to use any one of 18 different PMS products to connect to SR, all at very low Webervations prices. Supporting a shift of this magnitude to a hotel-style SynXis system is not something that we can make happen overnight. Interestingly, at the Select Registry conference in Williamsburg last winter, we were surprised to learn for the very first time that Select Registry was even looking for a central reservation platform; we  had not been made aware of it ahead of time at all. We were therefore unable to help assist the needs/specs and/or discuss how we could provide a painless and easy inexpensive solutionion, even though we power the majority of SR member’s website booking engines and availability calendars.

In our discussions with the interim Excutive Director in October, we explained that we didn’t know what we were going to do and that we needed time to figure out what this meant. What was it going to cost? What type of connection was it? Was it going to require all of our GDS customers to switch chain codes? Was it going to require everyone from Webervations to switch to using a full PMS? How long would it take to implement? Who at our company could be free to work on it? What other projects would get pushed back/delayed? The list goes on and on.  Select Registry did not have any details, so we reached out to SynXis directly. 

Here are some of the complications we are dealing with that make this not a "few week project" as Mike seems to think it should be:

1. Our internal team that handles connectivity is still working on the Travelocity connection we announced last spring. We have to complete this project before we can start on another.
2. Connecting to Synxis is not a quick project. It is a full-blown GDS connection; very few companies in our space have this. It’s similar to the Travelocity connection that has taken us six months so far.
3. Webervations itself was never built to support a GDS connection like this. There are numerous changes that would need to be made to the system in order to accommodate something like this, which means we would have to spend a large amount of time changing Webervations before it could even work correctly or launch a connection.
4. Many Webervations customers use any one of 18 PMS connections to get to Webervations. We are not sure if our customers would even use Webervations to connect rather than the PMS they are using.
5. It seems highly unlikely that properties who have been using Webervations as their own availability calendar would want to pay for this link. To my knowledge, we haven’t heard from anyone using Webervations that wants to pay for this connectivity. We have heard from a few RezOvation customers.
6. RezOvation does support connections like this, but any current GDS or Travelocity customer would have to switch GDS providers to Synxis and would not be able to participate in our Travelocity program through our chain code. Virtually all current GDS customers have paid for and have minimums under their current GDS contracts. They would either be double-charged, or would need to wait for up to a year before they switch.
7. This GDS connection is quite a bit more costly than our RezOvation GDS connection, so existing customers would see somewhere around $1,000 more in fixed fees/year than our current GDS connection.
8. Our entire company is taking a voluntary 3rd party Level 1 PCI Audit right now – we announced this in September. Before we could begin any work on connecting to a new CRS system, we need to complete the work on that audit, which is being handled the same team of expert developers.
9. No PMS that is not PA-DSS certified can take on new credit card processing customers right now, and by the middle of next year, support any credit card customers. RezOvation GT has already passed the 3rd party audit and is listed on the PCI site as compliant.  Webervations is going through that audit now. This is a more critical project to comply with credit card rules than anything else going on. I would caution any customer who is looking at switching to another PMS on this list, as many of the companies are not PA-DSS compliant at this point and are not allowed to take on any new customer for credit card processing until they are.
10. In addition to the all of that, we have a number of other projects that were months into development. Those include the enhanced credit card processing gateway for Webervations, new group management tools in RezOvation GT, an iPhone app for RezOvation, etc.

So our answer to Select Registry on whether we could connect was that we were not sure, and that we would need some time to figure this out. We told them that we would have some cycles to look into this more thoroughly in January as we would have breathing room to look into this with the amount of attention that it deserved. It seems like that would be a reasonable amount of time to scope out a project like this, particularly given no timelines were even conveyed to us from Select Registry as to when the new system was going to launch, or even how long we should continue to maintain the current SR/Webervations booking engine, being that we are the current provider, or the fact that we were notified of the choice weeks after the choice had been made. We ultimately want to hear from you - our customers - on this issue.  Some questions to consider:

• Do you want to connect to this new SynXis system? We’ve heard from some innkeepers that they get very few if any bookings from the SR website. Do you want all the expense of a GDS product? If the volume is going to be low, it would seem to make sense to stick to your current PMS provider, load a room or two manually into SynXis, and avoid the $1,200 surcharge to use a two-way connection. That way you only have the $350 up-front, $50/year IATA fee, and $600/yr minimum, not the $1800/yr minimum.
• If you are a current GDS customer with someone else, do you want to switch your provider and chain-code, and if so, when is your current contract up/what timeline are you looking at?
• If you are a Webervations customer, do you expect to use Webervations to connect to this system, or do you want to use your PMS for a direct connection to this system? If Webervations, does that mean you are using Webervations as your only system, or is it that your PMS company will not be connecting themselves?
• If you are planning on switching to a PMS provider on this list, do you understand that many of them do not connect to Webervations, and all of the sites that it powers?
• Do you understand that this connection does not automatically put a property into the merchant programs of sites like Expedia or Travelocity?

The issue we face is complex and your feedback would be greatly appreciated. We certainly want to connect to as many distributors as possible on behalf of our customers, and we’d love to be a part of this product. The truth is that we sent multiple different partnership proposals to Select Registry over the past 3-4 years only to have none of them come to fruition. Until we can move forward on something like this, we need to have some time to plan it and figure out what kind of customer demand even exists. Please let us know your thoughts so we can come up with a workable solution on this.

Sincerely,

Eric Goldreyer
BedandBreakfast.com / RezOvation / Webervations