Jaan Paljasma | Tech Blog

Priceline PCLN and Expedia EXPE  continue boycotting TripAdvisor's Mobile Booking Engine, while working with smaller MetaSearch players.  TripAdvisor rolled out it's mobile booking engine capabilities some time ago, claiming that their Mobile Booking Experience is far superior from other booking engines out there. Their Instant Booking feature (this is how they call it) is powered by Tingo and Getaroom. While the user experience may be questionable for many smaller and/or older online booking engines, this is not the case in 2014/2015 anymore - most bigger brands understand the increasing value of mobile visitor and have invested into their booking engines, some of them taking Mobile-First design approach. TripAdvisor's claims (who by the way has no real life experience in hotel eCommerce) do not apply bigger OTAs (and even bigger brands like Marriott). The question is not about the (mobile) user experience - it's about who owns the data. Every visitor to the...

Simplifying the EC2 Reserved Instance Model There is now a single type of Reserved Instance and it has three payment options. All of the options continue to provide capacity assurance and discounts that are typically around 63% for a three year term when compared to On-Demand prices. There are three payment options that so that you can decide how you would like to pay for your Reserved Instance throughout the term (in descending order of effective discount), and you can find these new options under the Offering  settings when purchasing Reserved Instances: All Upfront -  You pay for the entire Reserved Instance term (one or three years) with one upfront payment and get the best effective hourly price when compared to On-Demand. Partial Upfront -  You pay for a portion of the Reserved Instance upfront, and then pay for the remainder over the course of the one or three year term. This option balances the RI payments between upfront and hourly No Upfront -...