The message everyone trusts
When you load a rate, the system tells you how it went. It says success, and you move on to the next one. Nobody has time to go back and look.
I'd assumed that was safe. It isn't, or not always.
Eighteen rates that said yes
On a live load for a DMC in Durban, eighteen single rates went into Tourplan. Every one came back as success. None of them had stored anything.
The reason was small. The room type wasn't flagged as available single, so each rate was accepted and then quietly discarded. Nothing errored, and nothing in the log looked wrong.
Somebody loading the same rates by hand would have seen exactly the same screen. They'd have done nothing wrong, and the rates still wouldn't be there.
It isn't only single rates
Reading the book back turns up more than the last load. It reads everything already in there, including rates keyed in by hand months ago. Those look exactly as fine on the screen as the right ones do.
| Found | What it looked like |
|---|---|
| 18 single rates | Accepted and silently discarded. Every call returned success. |
| A three-guest rate keyed with an extra zero | A normal-looking number on the screen. Ten times too high on every quote. |
| A triple rate with two digits swapped | Close enough to pass a glance. Wrong on every quote. |
| 575 special offers that could still be quoted after they'd ended | Nothing flagged them. Past its end date an offer quotes a price nobody agreed. |
Why it's worse than a rate that fails
You'd think a missing rate would at least leave a gap. On Tourplan it doesn't. When a rate isn't there, Tourplan quotes the highest loaded rate plus ten percent, so the quote still goes out and still looks fine on the page.
That's what makes a silent failure expensive. Nobody goes looking for a problem the system has told them isn't there.
A rate that fails loudly gets fixed. A rate that says success and stores nothing is the one that ends up on a quote.
The only check that catches it
Read it back. After a load, go to the book and read out what's actually there, figure by figure, and compare it with the contract. Not the load screen, the book.
RateReady does that after every load, and then again every hour, because a run can stop halfway and still report success. At the 19 October read in Durban, 17,269 rate figures had been compared between contract and live book. 17,257 matched. The twelve that didn't are known and listed, not lost in the book.
If you load by hand, try this
You don't need me to start. Pick ten rates your team loaded last month. Open them in the book, not the load screen, and check each one against the contract.
If all ten are there, good. If one isn't, you know where to look next...
Either way, I'd rather you found out properly than took my word for it.