Bing… incoming press release from HotelsCombined, a Sydney based hotel reservation company.
They have launched a new scheme to guarantee 100% up-time to their affiliate partners.
“Through this agreement, affiliates of HotelsCombined.com can rest assured that the site will remain available to Internet users 100% of the time. If in the unlikely event the operation of the site is interrupted for any extended period of time, 100% of the missed commission earnings will be credited to the partner’s account.”
Is this for real or just a wacky plan that has been dreamt up in a marketing meeting in order to achieve a quick PR buzz boost?
100% uptime is a very tough target.
Digging deeper in discussions with their head of affiliates, Adam Zebrowski, I have found out the following:
- The policy is for their website only – if one or two of their upstream hotel content providers don’t return results within the timeout period they won’t take any responsibility for it (but other than that, it covers full system uptime which means any planned maintenance will still incur an account credit).
- Only 1 downtime event would have paid out in the last 6 months – a DNS issue caused by a denial of service attack on their DNS provider.
- The onus is on the affiliate to request a credit request - rather than credits being applied automatically
I would prefer to see a full system guarantee that includes all their hotel product suppliers.
I was once involved with a hotel distribution company and many of the providers had 2 hour maintenance windows at various times (normally weekend). When you totalled all the windows up (and they never occurred at the same time) it meant our full system uptime was significantly impacted (as we needed all suppliers to be operational for our system to work). HotelsCombined need to offer the 100% uptime guarantee over their entire system, not just their website in order for the guarantee to be credible.
The second key change I want to see is that the onus for requesting payout should be on HotelsCombined not their affiliates. Credits should be applied automatically.
Without these two changes it is a little too much of a PR buzz idea than a genuine advance in how HotelsCombined will work with their affiliates.
What do you think - is this a PR puff or for real?