Comments on: HotelsCombined guarantee up-time to affiliates – PR puff or for real?

By: Rob Barham

Rob Barham — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:45:07 +0000

Only a super affiliate like perhaps Skyscanner who are currently using the hotelscombined whitelabel would have anthing much to gain from making a claim unless the whole site goes down for a few hours or more.

By: Graham Robertson

Graham Robertson — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 02:19:26 +0000

Interesting, but I don’t know if it will generate the response they were looking for, or should I say the level of response they expected. I don’t know of too many major sites that go down for extended periods of time anyway. Why do they need to offer this? was the service poor in the past? Even having to set up and advertise something like this weakens my trust in the brand.

Sounds like a response to past criticism as I havent seen this problem (Downtime) in the Australian market.

@Alistair Calculating those missed commissions sounds like a very manual time consuming process with a ton of touch points. I wonder if just paying them out WITHOUT being asked could have been cheaper than hiring people to answer/process the requests?

By: Troy Collins

Troy Collins — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:36:12 +0000

Hi Al,

That’s exactly my point. Without a clear definition of how the affiliates are compensated for the downtime, the guarantee seems a little hollow. What’s interesting though is if they are successful (in creating a lot of PR Buzz) it would suggest that perhaps there is a genuine issue / grievance with the CPA model in general that needs to be addressed…

By: Alex Bainbridge

Alex Bainbridge — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:27:14 +0000

Thanks for the comments everyone.

Here are some direct quotes from HotelsCombined defining how they calculate what is owed (and why it is tricky to credit affiliates automatically)

“Credits are calculated based on statistical deviation from norm. You can think of it this way: We plot each Affiliate’s revenues on a graph, and then apply a credit that brings revenues over the outage period back up to the expected value. It’s difficult to be exact, so we add a little extra as a buffer zone.

It is unreasonable to assume we can automatically apply credits, because we can’t make assumptions about our Affiliates’ traffic volumes over the outage period. We need to ensure that the measured impact was due to the outage, and not to the Affiliate making a change to their traffic generation strategies. This is why we currently ask any affected Affiliates to contact us with the credit request, giving details of any changes to their traffic volumes over the outage period.”

So yeah, I did ask the question!

By: Alistair

Alistair — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:14:47 +0000

Troy,

If it were a new affiliate that was being referred into HotelsCombined, the click would be lost for sure and with it, any potential commission earned.

The question probably needs to be asked and answered, how are ‘missed commissions’ calculated? They could average your last x months earnings and top up your account with x many hours worth of downtime calculated against your previous earnings or something entirely different.

Al.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:58:56 +0000

And it would be more credible if the told their affiliates about it.

Not a mention in my inbox or on the ‘news list’ of my affiliate page.

By: Troy Collins

Troy Collins — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:25:12 +0000

Another thing – if the HotelsCombined site is down, on what basis will the affiliates be able to claim their lost earnings? If the site is down, the booking can’t be made – if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it…

By: Dennis Schaal

Dennis Schaal — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:08:13 +0000

Alex: It has the aroma of marketing to me. I guess guaranteeing lost commissions is a nice thing, but the site’s total downtime in 2008 was 64 minutes. Now, if Google would guarantee to make companies whole for all of the lost business due to gmail outages — like yesterday’s — then that would be something else.