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

Yes, availability is a significant obstacle. I live 1/2 mile from city
water and sewer and 15 miles from Research Triangle Park NC (15,000+ high
tech workers) all for the priviledge of living on an airport. No DSL
service. TimeW Cable arrived 2.5 years ago but they placed their box too
far from my house. So when I wanted high speed cable, I had to pay $700 to
get a drop off their drop. A significant obstacle. (BTW, TWC gave me data
service without TV service). Others nearby are in same boat and don't have
high speed access.

We use the internet to find hotels but rarely to book. We are usually
looking for location (airport) and services level. Price we rely on phone
negotiations. If we don't get what we want, we wait several hours and call
again.

Speed and browsers. I just had to reload a system after 8 months of use due
to spyware. They took over despite attempts to remove with various tools.
Made IE run like mud. We now use Mozilla and run a variety of anti-virus
and anti-spyware programs. Clean so far.

I still run dial up at home, at work we have a T1 line (I belive).
At work page loaded fast but counter did not work. At home took about
10 sec beacuse of picture and web counter.
I agree with most everyone lose the counter.
Personal I do not understand the reason for a "spash" screen. Why do I
want to load a page that does nothing but say click here?
Java,Javascript, Flash have there uses. Make it optional - warning
Java,flash required.
As for online reservations.
It depends on who is doing it. I will do it online my wife calls every
were.
Most of the time I use Orbitz, travelosity to find the best rate. Then
I go direct to the hotel or airline to book if posible.

Personal I do not understand the reason for a "spash" screen. Why do I
want to load a page that does nothing but say click here?

I inserted the "flash screen" ahead of the REAL start-up page, precisely
because 70% of users are still using dial-up connections.

My old homepage took (according to Frontpage's estimate) over two MINUTES to
load on a 28.8 modem! The new "flash screen" gets people into the site
almost instantly, so at least they know it's not a broken link. Hopefully
they will then stick around while the more graphic-intensive pages load.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

My old homepage took (according to Frontpage's estimate) over two MINUTES to
load on a 28.8 modem! The new "flash screen" gets people into the site
almost instantly,

If the "welcome to the inn" is basically your old home page, there's
really nothing visible on the page that =should= take that long.
However, each thumbnail is 10K or so. That's 130K right there, and
the pics are small enough they don't have to be that big. You could
probably squeeze them to 2K apiece (I just did it to the tiny red
baron, it looked fine and I was working from an already processed
image, which makes it look worse). The FrontPage navigation bar on
the left uses 2K per button of derived images for a total of 40K, and
probably preloads even more. It adds up. The text isn't all that
much, but the HTML for the scripts and preloads is.

KISS and you can shrink the page to something that loads faster than
your present splash screen.

Jose
--
Freedom. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Jay Honeck wrote:

snip

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!


Over the past 12 hours, the advice that keeps coming up is "make the opening
page simple and clear." That's been the rule for web page design since the
beginning (unfortunately, often ignored). Put you fancy stuff on other pages
and warn them the link contains graphics or large download or uses Flash or
whatever.

Think of it like someone calling the hotel. How long a message should you have
with how much information before you tell them how to push a number and go into
voice message maze? You don't, right.

I have a 28.8 modem and a 486 PC with a 1MB video card. Anything that doesn't
load in about 30 seconds, I move on unless I'm really interested. Then I stop a
about 90 seconds. Your home page took 35 seconds to complete but the text was
on and the graphic was painting before that.


snip

An ON-LINE BOOKING question for the group, if you please:
**************************************************
I am about to sign a contract with a company that will provide us with
real-time, on-line reservation and GDS support for hotels.

What you are saying (and in some of your responses to comments) is that you are
buying advertising and marketing to publicize the hotel and, hopefully, get more
bookings. You are not buying just online reservation. You need to price what
it would take to just use a reservation package on your own site and subtract
that from your "contract" price. Then you can determine if the advertising you
are putting out (the amount left after subtracting) is what you want to spend
and will it get you the return you want (amount of additional bookings you want
to have).

BTW, I see you are a member of IOWA B&B Guild. If you just want online booking,
pool your resources with other members and setup a link through them. There's
many a B&B that does that. And yes, you must establish a process of making sure
you check that online booking is sent to you in a specific time, guaranteed, so
you don't end up with double booking. Either that or have a disclaimer with the
online booking that it is subject to availability and will be confirmed with a
return e-mail from the hotel. These are little gotchas that I've seen drive
guests and keepers mad.

Online booking is not used as much as online searching. So it's important to be
able to find the hotel first and know basics even if not from the hotel's web
site. Your return guests, or any past guests, would be the source of most of
your online bookings because they know you and want to come back. Check with
them if they gave you an e-mail. Their advice may be even better that those
just flying around :-)

snip

Thanks for your help! (Your reward for helping me is getting to view this
goofy new video, forwarded to me by a British pilot. It's yet another in a
series of bizarre ads for Ford automobiles that apparently works to sell
cars in Britain. See it at:
http://alexisparkinn.com/photogaller...rd_sportka.wmv Here's
another one from the series, almost aviation related:
http://alexisparkinn.com/photogaller...s/BirdGone.mpg )
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Thanks, Dan

What you are saying (and in some of your responses to comments) is that
you are
buying advertising and marketing to publicize the hotel and, hopefully,
get more
bookings. You are not buying just online reservation. You need to price
what
it would take to just use a reservation package on your own site and
subtract
that from your "contract" price. Then you can determine if the
advertising you
are putting out (the amount left after subtracting) is what you want to
spend
and will it get you the return you want (amount of additional bookings you
want
to have).

I looked into "stand-alone" software packages that would allow me to do
real-time on-line booking from my own website -- and the price was WAY
higher than contracting with the big players in the market. And I'm not
talking a little higher -- I'm talking like 500 to 1000% higher.

And I'd STILL not be in the global distribution system (which gets you into
all of the travel agent's computers) or on Expedia and Travelocity.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

In article QiFtd.157408$V41.134990@attbi_s52,
"Jay Honeck" wrote:


How many of you guys actually make real-time, on-line hotel reservations?

I don't. I like dealing with people. I always use the phone to
make hotel reservations,

--
Bob Noel

Just tried the Inn's website, Jay; in Opera 7.23 it took about 10sec to
load; it seemed to 'pause', then deliver the whole page at once, rather
than loading things sequentially like most pages do.

Not sure why the delay; that big image is actually fairly low-res and
small, and the rest is almost all text.

if you want to dump the javascripted nav bars in the top left, you can do
great, cross-browser things with Cascading Style Sheets & link styling, to
replicate most of your nav bar's fiddly bits without any Java or
Javascript at all.

The cool thing about CSS styling is that even in non-CSS-capable browsers
(ie older browsers, or PDAs & Blackberries, etc) the links will just come
out as plain text, so they'll still be totally useable!

See my aviation page (www.warbard.ca/avgas/index.html) and look at the
small nav bar right below the title block - that's all CSS, but it's got
'animated' features.

Brian.

--

On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 15:43:44 GMT, Jay Honeck wrote:
I turn once again to you, the great internet gurus of aviation, for answers
to the mysteries of the web...

1. Does anyone know what the average speed modem is being used by the 70% of
people still using dial-up?

Almost all dial-up modems sold today will be the 56K bps, but will generally
not approach that because of telelphone line noise. For instance, I am
connected at 44K on such a modem. Your main page took 16 seconds to load -
not bad. Since most modems have error correction, if line noise causes an
error the packet (information is broken down in small packets which are sent
individually) is sent again, so you don't necessarily even achieve the
modem-to-line correct rate. So a _lot_ is dependent on line purity and this
can change from connection to connection from the same computer - yell at
the telephone company to repair it. haahaa

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 is usually, but not always, faster than applets because of their
loading time. But the _important_ thing is to have the Java written in
_standard_ code, ala Sun, and not an abortion of that code conceived by M$
which will only run on their machines. As a business you are shooting
yourself in the foot if the stuff only runs on M$ machines. (Some of us use
_real_ operating systems. grin) And while I am at it, the same goes for
the html code in the web page itself - same principle. M$ departed from the
standard code with 'special' effects and if those are used they may not work
correctly on other browsers, ala Firefox, Opera, Netscape, etc. So industry
standard html code should only be used.

scripting? How about "Flashmedia"?

Can be good if loading time is not excessive. Music causes huge loading times.
Flash must be handled well because of this.

3. I have pared our opening page back to practically nothing, yet it STILL
~
www.AlexisParkInn.com if you want to take a gander at it.) How long is it

See #1.

How many of you guys actually make real-time, on-line hotel reservations?

Have used it with my dial-up successfully but don't always book that way.
Sometimes you can save by online booking.

Still warm feelings from the great time at your pre-OSH celebration this
summer and visiting with you and Mary at OSH.

....Edwin (the blue/white Maule)

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ Edwin Johnson ....... ~
~ http://www.shreve.net/~elj ~
~ ~
~ "Once you have flown, you will walk the ~
~ earth with your eyes turned skyward, ~
~ for there you have been, there you long ~
~ to return." -- da Vinci ~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Still warm feelings from the great time at your pre-OSH celebration this
summer and visiting with you and Mary at OSH.

Same here, Edwin! It was a really, really great summer.

Looks like we'll be throwing the "Pre-OSH Pool Party" on a Saturday night in
'05, since EAA is now starting AirVenture on a Monday. That should make
things even more fun for those who wish to partake in some of Iowa City's
college night life!

(BTW: Playboy is in town this week, looking for their first "corn-fed" Iowa
Playmate. This comes after the news was published that Iowans are their #1
customers, per capita. It's fun to watch all the feminist groups go
apoplectic -- while all the girls line up in droves to participate! ;-)
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"