Reservation Management System

1. 1 INTRODUCTION Travel and tourism is a booming industry today. Technology has connected cities and destinations across different countries and brought them closer. The number of people traveling across different places has increased. Now, whether on a business trip or vacationing with family, everybody needs a place to stay and unwind. But it can be a pain in the neck sometimes getting the information about the hotels that suit your budget and then getting bookings done. Online Hotel Reservations are becoming popular method for booking hotel rooms.

Travelers can book rooms from home via their home computer by using online security to protect their privacy and financial information and by using several online travel agents to compare prices and facilities at different hotels. Prior to the internet, travelers could write, telephone the hotel directly or use a travel agent to make a reservation. Nowadays, online travel agents have pictures of hotels and rooms, information on prices and deals, and even information on local resorts.

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Many also allow reviews of the traveler to be recorded with the online travel agent.

Online reservations are also helpful for making last minute travel arrangements. Hotels may drop the price of a room if some rooms are still available. There are several websites that specialize in searches for deals on rooms. Large hotel chains typically have direct connections to the airline national distribution systems (GDS) (Sabre, Galileo, Amadeus, and Worldspan). These in turn provide hotel information directly to the hundreds of thousands of travel agents that align themselves with one of these systems.

Individual hotels and small hotel chains often cannot afford the expense of these direct connections and turn to other companies to provide the connections. Several large online travel sites are, in effect, travel agencies. These sites send the hotels' information and rates downstream to literally thousands of online travel sites, most of which act as travel agents. They can then receive commission payments from the hotels for any business booked on their websites. People can book directly on an individual hotel's website.

An increasing number of hotels are building their own websites to allow them to market their hotels directly to consumers. Non-franchise chain hotels require a "booking engine" application to be attached to their website to permit people to book rooms in real time. One advantage of booking with the hotel directly is the use of the hotel's full cancellation policy as well as not needing a deposit in most situations. To improve the likelihood of filling rooms, hotels tend to use several of the above systems.

The content on many hotel reservation systems is becoming increasingly similar as more hotels sign up to all the sites. Companies thus have to either rely on specially negotiated rates with the hotels and hotel chains or trust in the influence of search engine rankings to draw in customers. The ultimate service provided by these companies to the hotels and the online consumer is that they provide a single database from which all reservation sources draw immediate room availability and rates.

It is very important that hotels integrate with all the supply channels so that their guests are able to make accurate online bookings. There are many ways of making the online reservation; most of the online reservation systems use the centralized GDS system for making the reservation with the hotel directly. Examples of the GDS are Sabre, WorldSpan, Travelport. The online hotel reservation through GDS is just the tentative reservation, means that you do not need to pay at the time of reservation, instead pay at the time of check in or check out. . 2 PROBLEM STATEMENT Traditionally, travelers plans and looks for a hotel according to the location, price or whatever their criteria are and then decides the hotel, then he makes a reservation by telephone, fax, internet, or mail, or just through his travel agent. When hotel staff receives the request, they first look if they can provide available services. If there is enough resource in the hotel, they prepare the room, catering and transportation for the request and send back acknowledgement.

At last the guest arrives and checks in. The business flow is quite simple; however, to accomplish all these tasks is burdensome for both the consumer side and the hotel side without an efficient and integrated hotel management system. Telephone may be a good way to make a reservation because it is beyond the limit of time and space. Guests can call hotels at any time and any place. However, it costs much when the hotel is far away from the city where guest lives; especially the hotel locates in a different country.

Moreover, if there is a group of four or five people to make reservation together, it would take a long time for hotel staff to record all the information they need. Making reservation by travel agent saves consumers’ time and cost, but there is still millions of work for agent to do. These aforementioned difficulties have provided a need to integrate an online hotel reservation management system that will help to reduce the complexities associated with making hotel reservations. 1. 3 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

This project is aimed at developing an online hotel reservation management system that will help to automate the activities involved in booking a hotel room, providing functionalities that can allow customers to book for hotel rooms on the hotel’s website, a communication link between the hotel and her customers and also enable the hotel to manage customers’ reservations conveniently. 1. 4 SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS 1. 4. 1 SCOPE The proposed hotel reservation management system should be able to satisfy the following requirements: A web-based system that will run on a web server and accessed anywhere with a web browser.

Customers should be able to know the availability of the rooms on a particular date. Guests should be able to book the available rooms online. The system should be able to keep the records of the guests and the room allotted to them. The record of food and services availed by the customer should be kept. The system should be able to generate the bill for a customer. The system should also be able to generate transaction and activity reports. 1. 4. 2 LIMITATIONS

The following are the expected problems and constraints militating against the accurate conduct of the study which in one way or another may have an adverse effect on the quality and usage of the project. They include: Illiteracy on the use of computer can lead to marginalization of some certain travelers. Inadequate infrastructures such as internet facilities and power supply can lead to unavailability of the system. Access to relevant literature that is related to this topic is quite difficult. 1. 5 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The significance of the study is to bring to light the advantages of Online Hotel Reservation Management System and the earring problems associated with the manual method of hotel reservation, and how this problems can be solved using Online reservation techniques and the best approach in which we can go about solving problems involving online reservation through Online Hotel Reservation Management System. Expected beneficiaries of the study are: Hotel Companies Travelers and Tourist Researchers on the study 1. 6 PROJECT FEASIBILITY AND PLAN

The project is to be carried out after approval, requirement will be gathered, analysis will be done, models will be constructed and the design and implementation. 1. 6. 1 Methodology Waterfall development methodology has been regarded as the best software development methodology for a successful implementation of a hotel reservation system, Waterfall development methodology captures software design in a sequence of steps, it allows to carry out a thorough planning, requirement gathering and analysis and design before the coding and implementation of the system.

Fig 1. 1 describes the process flow of waterfall development methodology. Fig 1. 1 STEPS IN WATERFALL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY 1. 6. 2 Modeling and Computing Tools For perfect understanding of these requirements, some modeling tools such as Use Case, Data Flow, Activity and Entity Relationship Diagram to model the system to be developed. In order to make the system web-based, it will be designed with web scripting languages.

The interface will be designed with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), for the logic design, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), PHP is a scripting language for developing dynamic content on websites in other to make it interactive. Data and Information will be collected and stored with MySQL Database. MySQL database is a relational database management system that helps to collect and store data of related types. 1. 7 ARRANGEMENT OF SUBSEQUENT CHAPTERS

The project is divided into five chapters: Chapter one contains an introduction to hotel reservation, chapter two reviews literature that concerns hotel reservation and also reviews an existing system. Chapter three contains the analysis and the design stage of the software. Chapter four involves the implementation of the proposed system; while chapter five is the conclusion of the project which includes necessary recommendations for further studies. The source code for the system will also be contained in the appendix

REFERENCES Tom R, HotelTravel. com Launches 'Dynamic Rate Management System' for Partner Hotels, Global Press Release Distribution, 2009, (pp. 1-2). Yang X, Wanlei Z and Morshed C, GHIRS: Integration of Hotel Management Systems by Web Services, School of Information Technology, Deakin University. 2003, (pp. 1-8). Carolyn R, Overseas Hotel Management to Develop its Own Online Reservation System, PRWeb ebooks, 2010, (pp. 1-3). Varun J, HOTEL RESERVATION SYSTEM - Database Management System Project, 2010, (pp. -2). Jennifer M and Omar J B, ONLINE PROPERTY MANAGEMENT / RESERVATION SYSTEM FOR THE REDONDO PIER INN, Department of Computer Engineering Santa Clara University, 2002. Radix Web, 2011, http://www. radix. com/hotel-booking-management-system. html accessed 23rd April, 2011. SourceCodester, 2011, http://www. sourcecodester. com/hotel-reservation-system. html accessed 23rd April, 2011. Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia, 2011, http://www. wikipedia. com/hotel-reservation. html accessed 23rd April, 2011.