Curious, What are all these companies building that makes scale an issue? I see only CRUD products. At what point does scale become an issue? 1000 concurrent users, 10,000, 100,000?
The short answer is nothing. They create their own problems of scalability by their own poor engineering. Who still uses rails for an api/iphone app these days?
As far as MySQL being the bottleneck, I'm kind of wondering why that is. I'd imagine 99% of their workload is both cacheable and read only, and thus infinitely scalable.
Anyway, I've used Hotel Tonight a few times and most of my experiences with the actual product have been poor. The price I could have got through the hotel directly in a few cases would have been better, and the other time they promised a King bed only to be rebooked at the hotel to a smaller room and double bed. It seems their business model is largely around selling unused inventory at hotels for as high a price they can get, without really caring about the customer.
You'll notice they have an absolutely no money back policy. In my case I was forced to take the lesser room which was actually cheaper had I paid for it at the hotel. Since that experience I deleted their app.
Where I work, the hardest scaling problem we face really boils down to lots of users contending for the same resources. It's very possible that HotelTonight sees the same issues around room availability.
Sometimes when I read articles like this, I wonder if I have stumbled into an alternate universe. I am always having to google every Nth term that pops up, and the terms are indeed surreal. I think everything is going fine until I see "Varnish".
Has anyone used HotelTonight in the last two years? Curious as I thought they were leaps ahead with their app early in the iOS native development cycle but I've heard crickets about them since
I've happily used it a few times this year - I almost always check their prices against bigger sites like hotels.com and they can usually provide a lower price if I'm booking after 6PM (before then and it's often the same price you can find directly from the hotel). More importantly, I very much value their curated set of "advice" about the hotel, and find it significantly easier to filter than sites like booking.com or otherwise.
Their mobile app is nice, and the flow is extremely smooth. I did once have to wait 45 minutes at a Best Western for their customer support to fax something across before I was able to get my room.
I check it occasionally when doing a same-day hotel booking and I have never found a good deal. (I've only tried it for US hotels.) Very often the best price I have already found for a hotel will be matched on Hotel Tonight, but then they add their fee on top of it, making it a worse deal. And I don't like that they don't tell you about this fee till late in the purchase flow. Plus (and my info could be out of date on this point), HT doesn't tell you the bed situation in the room. Whereas on other booking sites, I know it's going to be two queens or whatever.
I used it a year ago to book a last minute hotel, when I got to the hotel 30 mins later they said they hadn't gotten it and they had no rooms available anyway. After they called Hotel Tonight and 20 mins of waiting for faxes they found a room for us though.
Not sure if that's a positive review or not, but it worked out for me.
I used it two weeks ago for the first time, got a hotel reservation two hours before arriving at 2 am for a fair price. Paid with Apple Pay and avoided thinking about currency exchange rates, etc. Very convenient iOS app.
This is a frustratingly misleading title. They haven't had an IPO yet and it's unclear if they ever will.
One article in Bloomberg about trying to turn the company around and prepare for an IPO isn't the same thing. There is undoubtedly an order of magnitude (or greater) between the companies who have actually gone through an IPO and the number who have claimed they (or the press has claimed) will.
[+] [-] rokhayakebe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatnotests|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamleppert|9 years ago|reply
As far as MySQL being the bottleneck, I'm kind of wondering why that is. I'd imagine 99% of their workload is both cacheable and read only, and thus infinitely scalable.
Anyway, I've used Hotel Tonight a few times and most of my experiences with the actual product have been poor. The price I could have got through the hotel directly in a few cases would have been better, and the other time they promised a King bed only to be rebooked at the hotel to a smaller room and double bed. It seems their business model is largely around selling unused inventory at hotels for as high a price they can get, without really caring about the customer.
You'll notice they have an absolutely no money back policy. In my case I was forced to take the lesser room which was actually cheaper had I paid for it at the hotel. Since that experience I deleted their app.
[+] [-] jeffasinger|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellofunk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aepearson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xfour|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manacit|9 years ago|reply
Their mobile app is nice, and the flow is extremely smooth. I did once have to wait 45 minutes at a Best Western for their customer support to fax something across before I was able to get my room.
[+] [-] vegashacker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BMFX|9 years ago|reply
Don't get me wrong hoteltonights support is great but all in all cost isn't as huge of a reason for me to use them as it was when they first came out.
[+] [-] Eridrus|9 years ago|reply
Not sure if that's a positive review or not, but it worked out for me.
[+] [-] lalos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knd775|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidu|9 years ago|reply
One article in Bloomberg about trying to turn the company around and prepare for an IPO isn't the same thing. There is undoubtedly an order of magnitude (or greater) between the companies who have actually gone through an IPO and the number who have claimed they (or the press has claimed) will.