Hi folks,
It strikes me that we allready have many of the bits and pieces needed to create these kind of solutions. The venue feature is already in Event manager package. Events also controles the number of available spaces. What to define as space is industry specific, i.e it's a matter of the proper category description. i.e. room, cabin, seat,etc. What would help a great deal is to have the category package integrated system wide to each module. That will greatly enhance the usablity and make it easier to understand what you can do with the toolkit.
If you need to store rate information, the logger package is capable of handling that, and it already gives linking option s to other parts of the system. I am now trying to create a From - To rate grid for simple point to point travel and find the combination of logger and room reservation very usfull, despite the lack of a few simple fill in screens. The venue feature in eventsmanager already refers to ecomerce categories,
What we lack is a coordinated effort to turn the generalized modules into industry specific ones, which makes sense as OACS is a toolkit. I am working on a blueprint of what can be achieved with minimal changes, only by adding my travel industry experience, so not from a programers perspective.
The travel industry has created the Open Travel Alliance, http://www.opentravel.org/members.cfm, outlining communication protocols in the industry. http://www.opentravel.org/2004B/index.cfm . While creating packages related to travel I feel it's important to take these into account, instead of making up our own definitions.
I will publish a .TVLweblog/wiki next week that might help prevent us from inventing the wheel.
Ben
