Did January’s sales surge slow your booking engine to a crawl?
January saw record numbers of would-be holidaymakers desperate for some sunshine flocking to online travel agencies. Whether they were simply looking or actually booking, search requests went through the roof, and some systems couldn’t handle it.
If you found that your booking engine slowed down to a crawl under all this immense demand, you weren’t alone. Many suppliers’ systems cannot handle the kind of numbers which we saw this ‘Sunshine Saturday’, and most aggregation APIs don’t have the facilities to manage overburdened suppliers resulting in slower speeds for everyone.
Slow webpage responsiveness isn’t just annoying for your customers; it also costs you sales.
According to Portent, a renowned digital marketing agency, the fastest loading e-commerce pages have the highest conversion rates, with a sweet spot between 0-2 seconds. Beyond that, every additional second leads to a drop in conversion rates of an average of 2.11%. It's clear that in today's fast-paced digital world, consumers have little patience for slow page loads, and a delay of more than 10 seconds can result in a significant loss of sales.
So even if you did well during the January sales surge, the point is, you could have done even better with a more responsive booking engine.
With the surge in travel demand in January, many online travel retailers found themselves struggling to keep up with the increased number of requests and most likely suffered a loss of income as a result.
Not all systems are created equal.
Some suppliers are using outdated or insufficient infrastructures to host their content. Those same suppliers also want to connect to as many retailers as possible. The result? When the frequency of requests surge, the supplier's systems become overloaded, sluggish, and eventually time out.
If your aggregation API isn’t constantly monitoring the performance of its connected suppliers and does nothing to ease the load, the slow speeds and timeouts are passed on to your customers. Not Ideal.
What you need is an API built for performance.
That’s where we come in. Resfinity is built with 24/7 performance monitoring technology. Suppose a supplier’s system struggles to cope with massive demand. In that case, our automated performance controls temporarily block the supplier from a receiving the request, giving your supplier’s system time to recover and your customers a super-fast browsing experience.
Once the supplier’s system has recovered, their inventory is automatically added back to your booking engine. It’s a win-win-win.
We are built different.
Just like leading tech giants, we generate the best possible performance by having full control over our software and hardware. Our infrastructure is purpose-built to maintain an excessive traffic frequency. When your traffic gets high enough, we can offer you additional dedicated cloud capacity to ensure the highest quality performance.
Unlike leading tech giants, we are flexible. You can scale up or down your infrastructure needs instantly. During high and low season , you can estimate your usage and pay for only what you need. Don’t worry if demand exceeds your estimates; our 24/7 performance monitoring means that if you’re almost at capacity, we will notify you and scale up your capacity on request.
Additionally, our software engineers continuously seek to enhance performance with API optimisation and infrastructure upgrades, meaning that in every sprint, we find ways to improve the platform.
Combine the best possible hardware with an extensive team of software engineers constantly optimising the API to get better and better performance. The only question remains; how many requests per minute do you need?
Hundreds of thousands?
During the January ‘Sunshine Saturday’ sales surge, Resfinity comfortably dealt with more than 250mn requests. Our clients regularly exceeded 100,000 requests per minute while still enjoying peak performance. Can your current aggregation API say the same?
Probably not.
The surge in travel demand during January caused many major online travel retailers to struggle with slow searches, resulting in lost sales.
Don't let low-performance aggregators cost you sales.
ANIXE's Load Management service brings boutique-level flexibility while maintaining the reliability of standard branded services. Join some of Europe's leading online travel retailers in taking advantage of a real travel industry-orientated load management solution.
So, whether you need us to handle 500 or 500,000 requests per minute, contact us today to learn more about how Resfinity's performance monitoring technology and purpose-built infrastructure can help improve your online travel retail business.
Read more about our specialistic Load Management Solutions module for online travel agencies and tour operators. Contact ANIXE today to unlock the hidden potential of your brand.
.