Online Hotel Booking

Overview

When travelling abroad, there always lies a necessity to plan in advance. This website helps a traveler to book hotels and residencies online. He is also able to get the local information such as the locality, people, cultures, and even transport.

Challenge

A well established Italian travel company was undergoing a facelift. It wanted to get a totally new online customer interface through which it aimed at achieving higher revenues and beat contemporary competition. Customer retention, getting new ones, and addressing new sponsors were the prerequisites.

Key specifications were:

• Laying out an elegant and easy-to-use UI.
• Site visitors to have full flexibility in the dynamic packaging of a wide range of holiday breaks.
• Automate the complete booking process and provide significant benefits.
• Offer linked online booking for all products.
• Support for easy interaction and integration with affiliated websites.
• Travel products module involving airlines and car rentals.

Solution

SOI offered the solution by creating an "Online Hotel Booking" project covering all the information flow and features as:

System flow

Hotel information, hotel services, room information, room availability data, standard prices are added by supplier using feature rich admin panel. Travelers can book hotels from different providers for each days of their itinerary.

On successful completion of booking, voucher is generated and mailed to customer as well as service or product provider. Site operates as a travel agent whereby the user pays for a hotel booking along with booking fee charged by site.

Features list:

• Interactive way to choose regions and cities (including Google Maps option)
• Choice of dynamic itinerary creation
• Single page access to all the information
• Split test pages for marketing initiative
• Combination of mode rewrite and language system to generate virtual urls with different content for split tests
• Integration of XML data from hotel suppliers
• Creation of regional booking site
• AJAX based pop-ups to access hotel information, photo galleries, search results and filtering
• Implementation of simple XML to parse and store XML data into existing hotel system
• Integrated Zapatec JavaScript framework for Grids, Forms, Validations

Technology

• Server:  Linux
• Web Server:  Apache 2
• Programming Language:  PHP 5
• Database:  MySQL 5
• Project Management Tool:  dotProject
• Development Tool:  Zend Studio Eclipse

Statistics

• Back end:  80 PHP pages
• Front-end:   49 tables and XML files for data storage

Team

• Project Leader:  1
• Developers:  2
• Web Designer:  1
• SQA:  1