Difference between revisions of "Glossary"

Revision as of 09:29, 10 September 2017

A

• Affiliate is a person or a business entity that has no fixed cooperation with hoteliga, but receives a commission when and if a referral or a sale is made.
• API Application Programming Interface is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. Basically, an API specifies how software components should interact. A good API makes it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks. A developer then puts the blocks together. hoteliga is using the APIs of OTAs and Payment Gateways to integrate with them. Also, hoteliga has developed its own API so that its customers can develop custom solutions and integrations.

C

• Channel manager is the tool with which someone can do channel management. See "Channel management".
• Channel management in the hotel industry is the planning of room availability and room rates. To avoid overbookings, the inventory of a hotel or other property needs to be continually updated across all of the distribution channels they may use including direct online bookings, travel wholesalers, and OTAs to name a few.
• Cloud computing is a computing-infrastructure and software model for enabling access to shared pools of configurable resources (such as computer networks, servers, storage, applications and services) which can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the Internet ("the cloud"). Cloud computing allows companies to avoid or minimize up-front infrastructure costs. As well, third-party clouds enable organizations to focus on their core businesses instead of expending resources on computer infrastructure and maintenance. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
• CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.

E

• Extranet in the e-travel industry is usually the private web application that OTAs provide to property owners so that they can manage their room types, rates, allotment, availability, restrictions and promotions.

I

• IBE is Internet Booking Engine, otherwise simply booking engine.
• ISP is Internet Service Provider, a company that provides individuals and other companies access to the Internet and other related services such as Web site building and hosting. An ISP has the equipment and the telecommunication line access required to have a point-of-presence on the Internet for the geographic area served.

J

• JSON JavaScript Object Notation is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML.

L

• Lead is potential customer.

N

• NR Usually stands for "Non-Refundable" (rate).

O

• OTA Online Travel Agent. For example, booking.com and Expedia.
• Overbooking is the situation, where one or more room nights are assigned to more than one reservation. That practically means that the same room would be shared by different customers for some days, which is of course impossible. Having overbookings in general, could be a hotel's practice. The managers either expect many cancelations in a specific period and therefore sell more room nights than possible, so that with the incoming cancelations, overall high occupancy will be maintained. Another reason for having overbookings in general would be the idea of "forwarding" customers and reservations to affiliated hotels in the area (in this way the hotel acts as an "agent" bringing reservations and revenue to other hotels). On the other hand, reservations could be the hotel's (or property's in general) worst nightmare, if having them is not a standard policy. Than can happen usually for various reasons: The channel (e.g. booking.com, Expedia, etc.) had technical difficulties and did not send in time its reservation to hoteliga, resulting in other channels sending for the same period their own reservations. Another reason would be the so called "race conditions" where in the matter of minutes or even seconds, before various system have enough time to update each other, two reservations for the same period take place. This can also happen by a human mistake, when for example the hoteliga user sets a reservation for a date in "tentative" status, which does not count as a real reservation but still shows in calendar. hoteliga by design allows overbookings to allow experienced users to do the management as they find best. However, hoteliga will display a warning within the reservation window as well as in the home page, advising the user to take action.

P

• Payment Gateway is a merchant service provided by an e-commerce application service provider that authorizes credit card or direct payments processing for e-businesses, online retailers, etc. The payment gateway may be provided by a bank to its customers (in hoteliga case Alpha Bank [GR], Eurobank [GR] or Redsys [ES]), but can be provided by a specialized financial service provider as a separate service, such as a payment service provider (in hoteliga case Braintree Payments).
• PBX is a Private Branch eXchange, a hardware system that handles routing and switching of calls between a business location and the telephone network. Their name originates from the way they interact with the PSTN (public switched telephone network). hoteliga is using a custom Asterisk VoIP PBX located in Germany.
• PMS is Property Management System.

R

• Reseller is a person or business entity that has a tight cooperation with hoteliga and acts as a local representative in a wider area or country. The reseller is working closer with hoteliga than an affiliate. He takes over support for all the customers he has brought to hoteliga and as a result there are no direct requests from his customers to hoteliga. For this service, the reseller receives a higher commission than an affiliate.

S

• SaaS see "Software as a Service".
• Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is typically accessed by users using a web browser. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service

T

• The cloud see "Cloud Computing".

V

• VoIP is Voice over Internet Protocol, a methodology and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. hoteliga's PBX is based on VoIP technology, that's why there may be quality issues when internet connection between hoteliga member and PBX location (Germany) is not stable or fast.

X

• XML eXtensible Markup Language. It is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable through use of tags that can be created and defined by users. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML