Companies often tout 99.99% as the gold standard for IT system uptime. But in the travel and transportation industry, a single ill-timed outage ahead of a major holiday can derail operations, damaging customer satisfaction and profits.
Case in point: In July 2024, during the busy summer travel season, an error during a software update affected more than 8.5 million Windows devices running CrowdStrike cybersecurity software, including those associated with major domestic airlines and their core operations. Because of the outage, Delta Air Lines canceled more than 5,000 flights, costing the company more than $500 million.
“You’ve got to test the stuff,” Delta CEO David Bastian said of third-party software in an interview with CNBC. “You can’t come into a mission-critical 24/7 operation and tell us we have a bug.”
To more accurately measure the effects of outages like the CrowdStrike incident, companies in the travel and hospitality sectors are changing how they measure success: Instead of fixating only on uptime, they’re more frequently embracing metrics like recovery velocity, suggesting an increased focus on customer satisfaction that might eventually inspire similar shifts in other service-oriented industries, including retail, foodservice, logistics, banking and even healthcare.
Why Recovery Velocity Matters More than Uptime in Hospitality and Transportation
Christian Petzold, founder and director of Barcelona-based tour company BCN Travel, says travelers are willing to forgive interruptions from system failures, delays or power outages as long as the recovery is fast, well communicated and handled smoothly.
“The factor that actually destroys the confidence of people is the slow and chaotic recovery that leads to people being stuck, uninformed or made uncomfortable for a long time,” Petzold told The Forecast.
“For example, a booking system for a hotel might be down for an hour. But if it is made operational with the help of backups quickly, the guests will hardly remember the problem.”
The rate of recovery directly influences customer trust and lost revenue, suggested Petzold, who said the speed at which operations return to normal determines whether an issue is a minor inconvenience or a crisis that damages the brand’s reputation. Uptime is typically similar across companies, he observed, whereas recovery velocity is a real differentiator that’s capable of demonstrating an organization’s resilience — or lack thereof.
“A destination resort, a cruise line or an airline can claim high uptime, but if the time taken to recover from one failure is eight hours, the impact in real life is more than the metric indicates,” Petzold said.
“Today's travelers want prompt responsiveness, real-time information and an instant fix when something goes wrong. In the travel and hotel sector, the brands that come out on top are not the ones that do not fail, but the ones that recover more quickly than anyone else.”
How One Company Improves Recovery Velocity
At Economy Bookings, a global online car rental platform operating in more than 150 countries, team members focus on recovery velocity by monitoring recovery time during regular drills. The company moves virtual computers to a backup location, enabling consistent crash replicas to be created in less than 15 minutes. CEO Alen Baibekov said this is fast enough to maintain front-desk check-ins even in the event that the main stack stalls.
Every several seconds, twin clouds receive data about vehicle inventory, pricing and payments. To monitor the actual recovery pace rather than relying on a slide deck, the team conducts monthly synthetic failovers, always during live traffic. The drills typically take less than 30 minutes to complete and ensure that partners are kept comfortable during high-season surges.
“Seeing guests leave an arrivals hall unaware of the drama that just took place in the background because your recovery velocity allowed them to stay on schedule is the true victory,” Baibekov told The Forecast.
When companies want to focus on recovery velocity, Baibekov recommends that the CIO start by determining which services generate direct income, bookings, loyalty and payments. Next, the company should make a recovery-time commitment that seems incredibly short. To save time, his team initially mirrors ony the data store instead of the entire app stack.
Baibekov also recommends practicing under load and automating the switch. His team has found that after a few cycles, as the metric becomes second nature, discussions about downtime give way to discussions about run-rate growth.
Travel CIOs who once viewed themselves as managing technology can now see themselves as enhancing the guest experience. They make a real difference by enabling new experiences that raise traveler expectations.
Jennifer Gregory writes about B2B technology for clients including Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Verizon, Google and AT&T. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, and rescues homeless dachshunds in her spare time.
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