HGVC Site Down?

[GT75]

Site seems to be back up.

I just called CS because I noticed that I needed to make a change to an upcoming reservation. CS said that the website is still down concerning any transactions.

 

[HuskerATL]

I just called CS because I noticed that I needed to make a change to an upcoming reservation. CS said that the website is still down concerning any transactions.

Maybe for MF payments also. I tried paying some but the site had an error.

 

[Lithoboy]

I WAS able to get in.. now it says down for maintenance again....

 

[PigsDad]

This is not a "maintenance" event -- when a website / system is down for that long, it is an "outage". It may have been caused by a maintenance upgrade, but it is still an outage, none the less. These things happen; I wish they would just be honest with us.

Kurt

 

[SmithOp]

This is not a "maintenance" event -- when a website / system is down for that long, it is an "outage". It may have been caused by a maintenance upgrade, but it is still an outage, none the less. These things happen; I wish they would just be honest with us.

Kurt

I wish they would do system and qa testing before deploying these updates! There are automated tools for regression testing, geez...

 

[PigsDad]

I wish they would do system and qa testing before deploying these updates! There are automated tools for regression testing, geez...

Sounds like you are in the industry, and we all know sometimes it doesn't always go as planned. I spent the last 20 years of my career working in the high-availability backend IT environment, and even the best companies had an occasional "oops" release/update, and our customers were banks, credit card companies, global services companies, etc. I can easily imagine a relatively small company such as HGV doesn't have near the rigorous IT processes and QA as the companies I worked with.

In order to do comprehensive QA testing, you generally need environments (HW and SW) that replicates and emulates the actual production environment. That is not a simple environment to set up, and many times there are small differences between the QA environments and the production environments. Most of the time those small differences don't matter, but every once in a while an update may work fine in the QA environment but blows up in production. It happens.

Kurt

 

[HuskerATL]

Sounds like you are in the industry, and we all know sometimes it doesn't always go as planned. I spent the last 20 years of my career working in the high-availability backend IT environment, and even the best companies had an occasional "oops" release/update, and our customers were banks, credit card companies, global services companies, etc. I can easily imagine a relatively small company such as HGV doesn't have near the rigorous IT processes and QA as the companies I worked with. It happens.

Kurt

They are over a billion dollar company...but, as you can see with the lack of simple proof reading in the club rules/similar documents, clumsy rollout out of Max, crappy app, and systems that don't seem to be very integrated, they act like a mom and pop shop trying sell on Etsy.

 

[PigsDad]

They are over a billion dollar company...but, as you can see with the lack of simple proof reading in the club rules/similar documents, clumsy rollout out of Max, crappy app, and systems that don't seem to be very integrated, they act like a mom and pop shop trying sell on Etsy.

But they only have about 14K employees worldwide -- how many of those are actually in their IT department? I worked at a company where they had twice that number just in the IT department. There is always pressure to push out releases with less and less resources (employees, tools, ets.), and sometimes issues happen. I can definitely empathize.

Kurt

 

[GT75]

This to me doesn't seem like a software update. There wasn't a planned announcement for system outage, that I am aware of. I also thought that CS somehow interfaced with the inventory via different software (just my educated guess).

 

[brp]

Sounds like you are in the industry, and we all know sometimes it doesn't always go as planned. I spent the last 20 years of my career working in the high-availability backend IT environment, and even the best companies had an occasional "oops" release/update, and our customers were banks, credit card companies, global services companies, etc. I can easily imagine a relatively small company such as HGV doesn't have near the rigorous IT processes and QA as the companies I worked with.

In order to do comprehensive QA testing, you generally need environments (HW and SW) that replicates and emulates the actual production environment. That is not a simple environment to set up, and many times there are small differences between the QA environments and the production environments. Most of the time those small differences don't matter, but every once in a while an update may work fine in the QA environment but blows up in production. It happens.

Kurt

I'm also in the industry (software, but not specifically IT) and very familiar with the complexity you're talking about as well. If this is an incremental change, then this amount of downtime is unacceptable. Incremental change should not cause this.

If this is a larger change, I would hope that they had done some stress testing in a sandbox before release. As you say, it will never be perfect but, again, it should minimize the downtime when going live.

It really seems to me that, if this really is a backend change, they did a bit of offline testing, but not enough, before going live. That's how it seems to me from the reasonably-well-informed armchair position, anyway.

Having just seen @GT75's comment, I also agree that this does not actually seem like a planned change, hence my "if" above. This looks more like something else.

Cheers.

 

[HuskerATL]

I agree. This doesn't feel like routine maintenance. They normally post a message that maintenance is going to be performed and when.

 

[brp]

It's live again (says he who reported this last time before it went down again....maybe this time?)

Cheers.

 

[PigsDad]

This to me doesn't seem like a software update. There wasn't a planned announcement for system outage, that I am aware of. I also thought that CS somehow interfaced with the inventory via different software (just my educated guess).

If done properly, you should never have to announce a planned update -- you just roll it out after you have done rigorous testing and it just works, so I wouldn't put any stock in it not being an update just because there was no prior announcement. Think about it -- does Amazon issue a notice before rolling out and update? In reality, Amazon has processes in place to do continuous updates -- their systems can roll out dozens of updates per day! But it could be anything: a bad update, a major HW failure, a connectivity service outage. I've seen some spectacular failures in my career.

Kurt

 

[brp]

If done properly, you should never have to announce a planned update -- you just roll it out after you have done rigorous testing and it just works, so I wouldn't put any stock in it not being an update just because there was no prior announcement. Think about it -- does Amazon issue a notice before rolling out and update? In reality, Amazon has processes in place to do continuous updates -- their systems can roll out dozens of updates per day! But it could be anything: a bad update, a major HW failure, a connectivity service outage. I've seen some spectacular failures in my career.

Kurt

Actually, I've heard that they do thousands of releases/changes a day, and some only go to a subset of users as a test before wider distribution.

But Amazon are at the pinnacle of continuous release. No one does it as well as they do, so this may not be a fair comparison. Most places do point releases, and some notice is a good idea.

But it still doesn't feel like that here. Of course, we'll never know.

Cheers.

 

[GT75]

If done properly, you should never have to announce a planned update -

True, however, HGVC does. But I do agree with what you @brp are saying because we will never know.

 

[HedonisticEpicurean]

I admit this thread had me nervous today. I was concerned about checking in at a HGVC at HHV. The computers were up and running at the front desk minutes ago. The nice person checking us in was surprised when I asked about the computer system being down since Friday.

We got checked in quickly.

The desk person said that over the weekend everything had to be done by hand and that one check-in would take anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes. He said the lines were long and the process was the old fashioned handwriting credit card numbers and pulling up reservations. Glad I missed that!

 

[escanoe]

True, however, HGVC does. But I do agree with what you @brp are saying because we will never know.

Never know …. unless they were hacked and personal data was breached that would trigger notification requirements.

 

[escanoe]

Here is the red letter update at the top of the website now.

SYSTEM UPDATE: The website is now available but with some limited capabilities. Reservations can be made but to cancel or modify you will need to contact Club. Visit our Contact Us page to contact a Club Counselor.

Note:
When I go to view my existing reservations they are listed as "not changeable" even though they should be and were in the past.

 

[GT75]

Correct, I had to call in to make a change to one of my reservations. Since I was within the 60-day mark, it had to be canceled and rebooked. The other thing that I noticed is that the reservation list seems to be in the order that the reservation was made instead of the reservation start date.

 

[dioxide45]

They are over a billion dollar company...but, as you can see with the lack of simple proof reading in the club rules/similar documents, clumsy rollout out of Max, crappy app, and systems that don't seem to be very integrated, they act like a mom and pop shop trying sell on Etsy.

A billion dollar company is small potatoes in the IT world. Especially if you compare them to the big tech giants or even a company like Airbnb at $75 billion. Attracting top IT talent as a company like HGV isn't easy. They don't get the cream of the crop.

 

[4TimeAway]

A billion dollar company is small potatoes in the IT world. Especially if you compare them to the big tech giants or even a company like Airbnb at $75 billion. Attracting top IT talent as a company like HGV isn't easy. They don't get the cream of the crop.

Low salary and a free offseason week? Seems like an easy sale compared to a timeshare.

 

[escanoe]

A billion dollar company is small potatoes in the IT world. Especially if you compare them to the big tech giants or even a company like Airbnb at $75 billion. Attracting top IT talent as a company like HGV isn't easy. They don't get the cream of the crop.

Yes, and they have to prioritize the HR budget to be sure they are landing the best and brightest sales weasels.

 

[GT75]

Note:
When I go to view my existing reservations they are listed as "not changeable" even though they should be and were in the past.

Now, your Upcoming Reservations list will state: "Please call to manage your reservation". You also will not be able to view your reservation via the web.

 

[Sandy VDH]

Now, your Upcoming Reservations list will state: "Please call to manage your reservation". You also will not be able to view your reservation via the web.

Sure hope this is temporary because it will never be able to walk a reservation.

 

[Reddart]

Yeah, I’m sure glad I finished my walking before this happened. I’d be livid if I woke up at midnight for nothing.