Region Search Missing?

[WhiskeyJack]

Sorry if this has been mentioned already. Has anybody else noticed that the United States Region selections are missing when you click on the "Select A Destination" link on the website? I am using Chrome.

 

[SNA27]

Yup! It's gone! I really liked the Region search too! On Edge as well as Chrome. I don't their design is browser dependent or even platform dependent. If you resize windows, you can see the availability window behaves as annoyingly as it does on the iPhone.

It's unusual and maybe even unacceptable to deprecate a feature without prior announcement! If this happened in an internal back-office system, IT will be getting roasted by the users! I can hear the screaming and shouting matches! But we are powerless against such unilateral BS! We just get to post on TUG BBS!

 

[SNA27]

Look at what I found! In searching for resorts, Region is still available! Wyndham IT can do better!

 

[SNA27]

But Region is definitely gone from the Booking Dialog!

 

[WhiskeyJack]

Thank you for your replies. For me it is still missing. Since you saw it back last night it must be a "glitch" Wyndham IT is having and not something they plan to take away permanently. At least I hope that is the case.

 

[SNA27]

No, it's gone from the Booking Dialog! If you're searching for information about resorts, and you click on View List of Destinations, you will see Region is available to select! A separate functionality.

 

[WhiskeyJack]

Just got off the phone with a VC Supervisor. She claimed that nothing has changed because they have never been able to search for bookings by Region in the website view they use. She didn't even know that owners did have this functionality. Actually she implied that I did not know what i was talking about. She refused to open a ticket to research whether something was broken or done on purpose. So I believe the removal of searching by Region for bookings was done on purpose. And if you look at this sentence from Michael Brown's recent Platinum letter it appears it was done on purpose to speed up the searches.

"In the spirit of simplified vacation planning, we have a dedicated team making enhancements to the Club Wyndham website. I am pleased to share that we are making great strides and are now delivering a 50% increase in the speed of vacation search results. We will pursue further improvements to inspire your vacations and simplify your online booking experience."

So their IT group was likely given a mandate to speed up search results and the only way they could come up with a way to implement that was to take a good functioning benefit (i.e. Region level searching) and limit the searches to a State or City. Not happy.

 

[chapjim]

Just got off the phone with a VC Supervisor. She claimed that nothing has changed because they have never been able to search for bookings by Region in the website view they use. She didn't even know that owners did have this functionality. Actually she implied that I did not know what i was talking about. She refused to open a ticket to research whether something was broken or done on purpose. So I believe the removal of searching by Region for bookings was done on purpose. And if you look at this sentence from Michael Brown's recent Platinum letter it appears it was done on purpose to speed up the searches.

"In the spirit of simplified vacation planning, we have a dedicated team making enhancements to the Club Wyndham website. I am pleased to share that we are making great strides and are now delivering a 50% increase in the speed of vacation search results. We will pursue further improvements to inspire your vacations and simplify your online booking experience."

So their IT group was likely given a mandate to speed up search results and the only way they could come up with a way to implement that was to take a good functioning benefit (i.e. Region level searching) and limit the searches to a State or City. Not happy.

That would make sense. Region searches were painfully slow and not at all reliable. Sometimes the regional search would yeild no returns but if you searched the same dates by state or city, you'd get results.

 

[WhiskeyJack]

Agree that Region searches were painful but it did work most of the time for me at least. So if the mandate to IT was to speed up searches would it not have been a better solution to leave in tact current functionality and fix that functionality versus speeding up searching by taking something away? Seems like a lazy IT implementation solution to me.

 

[chapjim]

Agree that Region searches were painful but it did work most of the time for me at least. So if the mandate to IT was to speed up searches would it not have been a better solution to leave in tact current functionality and fix that functionality versus speeding up searching by taking something away? Seems like a lazy IT implementation solution to me.

I don't think you'll find a lot of people here who will defend Wyndham's IT department. If the task was merely to make it go faster, that could explain the loss of region searches.

Besides thinking region searches were not reliable, I never really thought of Oklahoma as being in the South. Perhaps if they made the regions a bit smaller, like they were prior to Voyager, the searches wouldn't bog things down. Florida, SouthEast, Mid-Atlantic, NorthEast, MidWest, MidSouth, Gulf Coast, Mountains, West Coast -- something like that.

 

[SNA27]

Loss of region search will not make anything else go faster! Actually Region is trivial compared to the filter options below. I wonder who uses them when booking?
The problem is with the query plan produced by the Query Optimizer of the SQL engine. It doesn't do a good job when complex queries are involved.
By carefully restructuring your SQL query or creating dynamic SQL queries based on user input, you can speed this up by orders of magnitude!

 

[SNA27]

Construct one query with a zillion search criteria whether or not the user has specified the criteria and let the query optimizer to figure out the 'best' query plan to retrieve the data.
But if you understand the data structure and indexes available and know the limitations of the query optimizer, you can dynamically construct surgical strike queries based on user criteria! Difference will be night and day!