Hotel portal and online booking system

Please note that this project was developed in 2008-2009. Thousands of man hours were spent over these 1-2 years however the client later decided to shut it down and liquidate due to fierce competition from existing hotel booking sites such as booking.com.

A feature rich home page is provided where the hotels are grouped together under different classifications to attract the maximum number of bookings.

The client underlined the importance of an interactive, good-looking and very easy-to-use interface which would appeal to his international users.

The web application is catering to a multi-lingual audience and translations are supported by Zend translation which is part of the Zend Framework.

The user of the online booking system can search for the hotels of choice using the simple search available on the home page.

An advanced search facility is also provided to refine the search further.

The hoteliers have individual logins which permit them to manage their data and make changes to attract the maximum customers to their properties.

Hoteliers can change their bids to attract more traffic and bookings. The more money the hotelier is willing to pay, the higher he will rank.

Hotel details gathered in the application are quite extensive. This helps the user to tailor their business or holiday stay according to their wishes.

One of the greatest challenges of the project was to optimize the search engine. As many attributes from many database tables were searched through the MySQL queries and log files needed to be studied in detail to understand how to tweak them right for better performance.

Benefits of the Booking Portal

The online booking application gives the user complete flexibility and choice. Information about the hotels are arranged aesthetically and concisely to help the user to make informed choices.

Maximum information possible about the hotel is provided. The search engines allow the user to filter their stay details to the minutest detail.

The ratings given by hotel guests lend authenticity to the grading of services and hospitality of the property. His ratings influence the hotel selection by other users; hence the application becomes very consumer-oriented.

The booking processes are simplified and can be managed with basic information and minimum inputs.

The admin part of the system includes essential business software modules such as CRM, accounting software and order management.