OT - Internet and on-line booking questions for the group

Jay Honeck wrote:
Yesterday NPR announced that only a third of internet users are connected at
high speed, using either DSL or cable. This truly surprised me, and I'm
absolutely amazed that so few people have made the jump to high-speed
internet -- I could never, ever go back to dial-up, and have been on cable
modem for years.

As others have said, availability is limited in a lot of areas. We've had
it available for a long time, but only made the switch to cable internet
about 6 months ago, so my wife could VPN to work. Up till then, I felt
that dialup was "good enough". Of course, I'm hooked to the internet all
day long at work. Our connection at the beach is still dialup, so I
don't surf much on weekends.


Because of this rather shocking statistic I instantly redesigned our webpage
so that the home page is smaller and opens more quickly. (According to what
Frontpage was telling me, it would have taken several minutes to open over a
28.8 modem!) It never dawned on me to design the page for dial-up, because
I thought slow connections were on there way out!

I'm a big advocate of designing web sites for modem use. I feel that most
people don't really need to spend the extra money for broadband. If
broadband prices eventually drop to dialup levels and become universally
available, then that'll be a different situation. I maintain two small
web pages (http://www.oc-adolfos.com and http://www.oceancityairport.com)
and have intentially made them "simple" in order to allow faster loading
over dialup. I could have made them fancier, but why? They provide the
information I want to provide, and that's the important thing.


WEBSITE QUESTIONS for the group, if you please:
**************************************************
1. Does anyone know what the average speed modem is being used by the 70% of
people still using dial-up?

I suspect the average 56K modem is connecting at somwhere between 33.6K
and 48K

2. I hear people say that Java is "evil" all the time -- yet it seems that
every cool effect on a webpage requires Java. What is bad about Java
scripting? How about "Flashmedia"?

I've been running my browsers with Java disabled for many years. It
hasn't seemed to effect the "quality" of my web browsing. I'm sure that
I'm missing an occasional animated applet, but I figure it's safer from a
security standpoint to disable it. I do allow javascript and flash, and
I realize that they could potentially cause similar problems (malicious
code), but I take the chance with those. As others have pointed out, the
probem with Java, javascript and flash is that the code is executing on
your computer, instead of the web server. Java applets and Flash also
have the secondary "problem" of sometimes being rather large downloads
into your computer, prior to executing (which is also a dialup concern).


An ON-LINE BOOKING question for the group, if you please:
**************************************************
How many of you guys actually make real-time, on-line hotel reservations?
My gut feel has always been that we would eventually have to jump on this
band-wagon, because more and more people are booking on-line. However, this
newly released figure, showing such low high-speed internet usage, really
makes me wonder if people are actually using on-line bookings much, or if
this is a tiny minority using it only occasionally.

I rarely travel, but when I do, I book over the internet exclusively.

--- Jay




--
__!__
Jay and Teresa Masino ___(_)___
http://www2.ari.net/jmasino ! ! !
http://www.oceancityairport.com
http://www.oc-adolfos.com

"Jay Masino" wrote in message
...
[...] As others have pointed out, the
probem with Java, javascript and flash is that the code is executing on
your computer, instead of the web server.

Well, to be fair, this is true even of plain old HTML. Just because one
looks like an actual "program" while the other looks more like "data", that
doesn't mean they both don't have the same potential for abuse.

Security flaws almost never involve taking advantage of high-level execution
units (e.g. a Java interpreter). They generally involve getting data to be
copied to your computer in a way that causes the data to be executed. This
is potentially just as easy to do with HTML, JPEGs, or even text files as it
is with Java, Javascript, Flash, etc.

Inasmuch as disabling scripted content does reduce one's total exposure to
downloaded data, doing so can reduce your risk exposure. But it's not
because the content is a "program" versus "data". It's just that you're
downloading less data, and fewer different kinds of data.

Pete

Peter Duniho wrote:
Well, to be fair, this is true even of plain old HTML. Just because one
looks like an actual "program" while the other looks more like "data", that
doesn't mean they both don't have the same potential for abuse.
SNIP

True.



--
__!__
Jay and Teresa Masino ___(_)___
http://www2.ari.net/jmasino ! ! !
http://www.oceancityairport.com
http://www.oc-adolfos.com

You already got some good replies. Pay special attention to the "less is
more" vibe. And by that, I'm not just talking about bytes. Just because
you CAN make your website blink and jiggle, that doesn't mean you SHOULD.

As far as browser stability issues go, I ran into a problem recently where
Sun's Java plug-in was causing IE to crash. Unfortunately, it also wasn't
properly detecting and downloading the latest update. I had to uninstall
the plug-in and download the latest version manually. Thankfully, after all
that the crashing problem did go away with the latest version.

It's well and good if you want to switch browsers for your personal use --
nothing wrong with Firefox, as far as I know. But that's a red herring
here. Other people WILL be using IE, and not all instability/crashing
problems are IE's fault anyway (i.e. you could just as easily have them in
other browsers). By minimizing the "wiggle factor" of your web site, you'll
tend to stick to the more heavily tested areas of all browser code, and
likewise will tend to avoid the parts that cause crashes.

Finally, this was mentioned in another reply, but I just want to
reemphasize: download speed is affected by more than just the number of
bytes of your web page. Depending on how you're hosting it, you could be
sharing server CPU time and bandwidth with other Internet users, at the
server site or elsewhere. One would hope that for a person using dial-up,
the modem would be the limiting factor, but it's not always. It's well and
good to test your web site yourself, but be careful when trying to
extrapolate your own results to other people's experience.

As far as online booking goes: when we travel, we use the Internet almost
exclusively for research. But we book by phone. Call us old-fashioned.
That said, I'm not convinced using the phone is any more reliable; we've had
plenty of hotel screw-ups, from losing our reservation altogether to minor
snafus related to type and location of the room, even booking by phone. As
far as getting the best price goes, we're not huge fans of haggling; if
we're looking for the lowest price, the hotel who quotes the lowest price
unprompted gets the booking. So maybe we ought to consider booking
online...how much worse could it be?

Pete

That said, I'm not convinced using the phone is any more reliable; we've
had plenty of hotel screw-ups, from losing our reservation altogether to
minor snafus related to type and location of the room, even booking by
phone.

This is my main fear with setting up real-time on-line booking. I have
this horrible fear that we're going to end up double-booking suites (someone
booking it on-line at the same moment that we are booking it on the
phone) -- and what will we do then?

For most hotels this wouldn't matter -- one room is as good as the next.
But we have people SPECIFICALLY booking the Blackbird Suite (for example) --
and they are NOT going to be satisfied with the Red Baron Suite -- even
though they are comparable suites from an amenities standpoint.

*sigh* I'm taking a huge risk with this on-line booking contract, but I
think it's necessary in order to take us to the next level. Hope we don't
end up screwed (up)...
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:KCMtd.225691$R05.149415@attbi_s53...
That said, I'm not convinced using the phone is any more reliable; we've
had plenty of hotel screw-ups, from losing our reservation altogether to
minor snafus related to type and location of the room, even booking by
phone.

This is my main fear with setting up real-time on-line booking. I have
this horrible fear that we're going to end up double-booking suites
(someone booking it on-line at the same moment that we are booking it on
the phone) -- and what will we do then?

Is there any way to use the same routine(software) at the
registration point(telephone in) in the hotel as the internet connection is
using? What I'm thinking is whichever finishes first gets the room. I'll bet
you won't come down to a photo finish.

Double-booking sounds like it can happen cuz you're now keeping two sets of
registration books. The key is to keep only one, so option a is any phone
registrations would be done thru your on-line system (employee typing it in)
and option b is your on-line registrations get posted quickly/immediately to
your in-house registration system.


Bob Clough


"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:KCMtd.225691$R05.149415@attbi_s53...
That said, I'm not convinced using the phone is any more reliable; we've
had plenty of hotel screw-ups, from losing our reservation altogether to
minor snafus related to type and location of the room, even booking by
phone.

This is my main fear with setting up real-time on-line booking. I have
this horrible fear that we're going to end up double-booking suites
(someone
booking it on-line at the same moment that we are booking it on the
phone) -- and what will we do then?

For most hotels this wouldn't matter -- one room is as good as the next.
But we have people SPECIFICALLY booking the Blackbird Suite (for
example) --
and they are NOT going to be satisfied with the Red Baron Suite -- even
though they are comparable suites from an amenities standpoint.

*sigh* I'm taking a huge risk with this on-line booking contract, but I
think it's necessary in order to take us to the next level. Hope we
don't
end up screwed (up)...
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Jay,


Jay Honeck wrote:
That said, I'm not convinced using the phone is any more reliable; we've
had plenty of hotel screw-ups, from losing our reservation altogether to
minor snafus related to type and location of the room, even booking by
phone.


This is my main fear with setting up real-time on-line booking. I have
this horrible fear that we're going to end up double-booking suites (someone
booking it on-line at the same moment that we are booking it on the
phone) -- and what will we do then?

For most hotels this wouldn't matter -- one room is as good as the next.
But we have people SPECIFICALLY booking the Blackbird Suite (for example) --
and they are NOT going to be satisfied with the Red Baron Suite -- even
though they are comparable suites from an amenities standpoint.

*sigh* I'm taking a huge risk with this on-line booking contract, but I
think it's necessary in order to take us to the next level. Hope we don't
end up screwed (up)...

Will this be real-time? Have you considered using the app yourself to
do the bookings? That way you won't double book, as you will have the
same interface as the customers.




--
Remove "2PLANES" to reply.

Will this be real-time? Have you considered using the app yourself to do
the bookings? That way you won't double book, as you will have the same
interface as the customers.

Yes, that's what we will have to do -- but the reservations will still have
to be entered into our in-house booking system, too -- since it's the
financial system. (The on-line system only takes and tracks reservations
and availability -- it has nothing to do with billing, etc.)

And since this will have to be done for each and every reservation (or
walk-in guest), there is a HUGE opportunity for desk staff to make mistakes.
It's just another step in an already complex system, and I can see it
getting easily screwed up. And, since there is time involved, the
possibility of double-booking a particular suite is a real one.

I just won't know how likely it is to happen until we go "live" with it.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Jay Honeck wrote:

I just won't know how likely it is to happen until we go "live" with it.

The likelihood of this happening is 100%. The only uncertain thing is how often
it will happen. We studied airline booking systems for database management
classes. Based on the rough info provided there, you're going to have real
problems during the busy periods (like football season).

George Patterson
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.