i'm back in now.

Bill from Hyatt E-Commerce here. We had a major outage in the datacenter last night. The datacenter lost power and there was a problem with the battery / diesel generator backup. All systems for all customers in the datacenter went down hard. A key component called a storage area network was damaged during the power failure and needed to be repaired - hence the long delay. I apologize for the impact and we are working with the hosting provider to get to the bottom of this incident to reduce the chance of a similar outage in the future.

Bill from E-Commerce here. Glad to be here and thanks to all of you for your business at our hotels and online.

Are you finding that "briefly" is more than 10 minutes? We have considered increasing the session timeout values, but it does put an additional demand on the servers. We've considered 15 minutes rather than 10. Our logs show that very few users seem to be going over the 10 minutes. If it you are getting this less than 10 minutes after your last interaction, then we have a bug somewhere.

I'd be interested in reports from others who are running into this timeout issue and your thoughts on the 10 minute timeout.

One bug I want to raise is the following using IE:

After selecting my hotel and rate, I am on the final confirmation page. In the beginning there is a choice of logging in as a Hyatt GP member. Doing so results in landing on the account overview with no way back to the confirmation page. One has to start all over again to finish the reservation.

Logging in on the top right corner however results in staying on the confirmation page and I can type in my credit card details and I am done.

The other workaround is logging in before starting the reservation process.

Would be good to fix that as this might cause a lot of GP members a lot of inconvenience when booking online.

This happens to me on Google Chrome too.

A 10 minute timeout would probably suffice to explain my experiences. It's pretty easy for something online or offline to take me away from interacting with Hyatt.com for that short a period of time; and most other Web sites I deal with that have login sessions don't expire my session that quickly, the only ones that do that come to mind are online banking sites.

Digging through logs to determine the frequency of users hitting the 10 minute timeout and have to re-login to continue what they were doing can be a tricky business. How sure are you that your log files data mining is doing a good job of characterizing this rate? For example, based on my FT username, you can figure out what my Hyatt GP account number is. Does your log data mining show that my Hyatt.com session timed out on me a couple of times today and I had to re-login to continue what I was doing?

For me too - it's a pain.

And now clicking on 'rates & reservation' button (on the title bar) from seemingly anywhere on the site brings up a 'technical difficulty' page.

Bill from Hyatt E-Commerce here. Good suggestion, we'll take a look at this.

Whoops. Didn't include the message.

Bill from E-commerce here. Good suggestion. We'll take a look at it.

Bill from E-Commerce here.

We're doing some work on session management that will make it practical to set longer session timeouts. This will take some time however.

Most people move through their interaction with Hyatt.com fairly quickly. As you might expect, a very large number are there for something very specific like getting a phone number or address and then they immediately leave. However, if you're one of the people that the session timeout hits, this is cold comfort. We're going to look at increasing the session timeout and apologize for any inconvenience.

Stewie, Bill from Hyatt E-Commerce here. I just checked the transaction monitors for the time of your email and didn't see any issues. Could I trouble you to send me a private message describing exactly what you did to cause the error, if you remember?

Anyone else having a problem?

Bill, I just want to publicly thank you on behalf of our members that you are paying attention to our concerns here. I know that we are a bit harsh at times to the tech staff at Hyatt but hopefully your presence here indicates that Hyatt is taking the tech issues seriously. Again, thanks for your presence

Happy to get engaged and look forward to comments from everyone on FT.

Glad to have you here, Bill! The only thing I dislike about the website is the new section that was created for the gold passport bonus offers. It would be nice if you put it back to the way it used to be, or added something that listed each state and country the properties are located in. The old way was much easier to search for offers, while the new way takes more time.

Like others, I whole-heartedly agree with this. I was just on hyatt.com and filled out a survey too, and mentioned this.