Forum OpenACS Q&A: Somebody Interested in Implementing a Hotel Room Booking Application?

Hi,

we've got an interesting project here to develop a multilingual room reservation system for a hotel in Barcelona.

We would need at the front end:

- Visualization, navigation and search
- Availability of rooms
- Customer registration
- Credit Card Payments
- Integration with the static web site

At the back end:

- Define room types
- Set prices per room type
- Reserve rooms for online sales
- 2-3 Reports

Project location is Barcelona, Spain. No Spanish language skills are necessary, English is sufficient. You would probably need to come here for 1-2 weeks during the end of the project (implementation, installation, ...), while the main programming could be done from abroad.

The project is relatively low-budget. However, there are quite some hotels around in the world who would urgently need a similar service...

Please drop me a short note if you are interested.

Bests,
Frank

mailto:frank_dot_bergmann_at_project_dash_open_dot_com
http://www.project-open.com/

Frank,

I have for some time been pondering the possibility of a system for selling/booking seats at theatres and other venues. I had it in mind that the software would allow for user definition of venues so that each time a new venue is entered by someone it becomes part of the system venue library.

The idea would be that each seat would have a status of either available, not available and sold. Also each seat would have properties such as 'restricted view' or 'standing room only'.

This would be integrated with the general payments system which is intended to be broken out of the original ecommerce module anyway (so that services can be sold).

It strikes me that there are many parallels between a fully configurable hotel room reservation system and the system that I describe.

Perhaps any solution could be made flexible enough to support both sets of needs.

On another subject, I hope your CRM project is going well and look forward to catching up with you on that some time soon. Matthew Geddert has been progressing with a new contacts module and Lee Denison is planning more CRM work later on this year. It would be good to keep abreast of developments so that we don't dupliate work.

Regards
Richard

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

Thanks to everybody who replied. We're going to contact you with the detailed specs of the system and some other variables.

Ben, I think the answer to your remakr must have something to do with "open-source psychology" and/or the difference between a solution and a toolkit. For me this was an area of intense suffering, because several of my former bosses (non-techies) didn't understand for example that you only have to adapt a CSS in order to change colors and even the look and feel of a web application.
And we techies frequently don't seem to get that customers need solutions...

Bests,
Frank

www.project-open.com

Hi Frank,

Correct, and the fun thing is the answers are already there in many cases like in this example... https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=267510 , only the correct logic is missing because of diferent points of view and insight.

Cheers
Ben

P.s .I am kind of following the idea behind http://www.tadalist.com/ where users are motivated to figure out solutions themselves with limited functionality, and refered to more advanced solutions in a later stage. As a matter of fact, that's how I came accross AD in the early days when "remind me"was revolution. Some tricks are timeless 😉

The majo difrence is that today we have already solved most logistical issues, so creating a tilormade solution isn't that complicated anymore.