Omni Hotels & Resorts has been experiencing a massive outage in its IT systems since Friday, affecting reservation systems, electronic locks , and POS systems.
The official website went down on Friday, and when it came back up over the weekend, there was a notice that said: “Dear valued visitor, we are currently experiencing technical difficulties, please try again later.”
According to customer reports on social media, while all hotels remained open and accepting new guests , front desk employees experienced problems with new reservations, credit card payments, and modifying reservations that have already been made.
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" It's really bad. You have to message them to come and let you into your room and it usually takes 30+ minutes for an employee to get there and unlock it ," a customer said on Monday
Omni Hotels has not provided details about the outage affecting all of its hotels, but said Monday that its IT team is working to restore systems.
“Dear valued guests, our IT teams continue to work to restore our systems which are currently down ,” Omni Hotels said on Twitter and Facebook. “We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience.
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The hotel chain's helpline is also down, with a recorded message saying: "Thank you for calling Omni Hotels and Resorts. We apologize that we are experiencing technical difficulties at this time and are unable to answer your call. Please try again later."
As we said, no details about the situation have been published, but such an extensive outage may be due to a cyberattack.
According to some Omni Hotels employees, the IT team is restoring the affected servers from scratch, with staff being told that the systems will be back up and running on Thursday.
Omni Hotels has 50 hotels and resorts in the United States, Canada and Mexico, with approximately 23,550 rooms and 28 golf courses.
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Impact on customers
Judging by the comments on social media, customers were significantly affected by the Omni Hotels systems outage. Initially, malfunctions in the reservation system caused serious problems. Customers were unable to make new reservations or confirm their existing reservations, which created a situation of uncertainty and concern.
Then, problems with the room lock systems caused additional inconvenience. Guests were unable to enter their rooms, which could have led to disruption and insecurity, especially if they were forced to wait an unspecified amount of time for the problem to be resolved.
Finally, issues with Point-of-Sale (POS) systems may have caused significant difficulties for customers when paying for hotel services. This may have led to delays and possibly insecurity regarding the financial transaction.
Source: www.bleepingcomputer.com
