Hotel Reservation: A Business Case Study Our initial thinking to develop GHIRS is to minimize the human interaction with the system. Since GHIRS is flexible and automated, it offers clear benefits for both hotel customers and hotel staff, especially for group hotel customersand group hotel companies.Group hotel companies usually have lots of hotels, restaurants, resorts, theme parks or casinos in different locations. For example, Shangri-La group has hundreds of hotels in different countries all over the world. These groups have certain customers who prefer to consume in hotels belong to the same group because they are membership of the group and can have inpidual services.69350

The first step of a scenario of hotel reservation is that the consumer plans and looks for a hotel according the location, price or whatever his criteria 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, cateringand 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, itcosts 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. They gather the requirements from consumers, then distribute to proper destination hotels. Because   these hotels don’t use a same system (these thousands of hotels may use hundreds of management systems), someone, agent or hotelstaff, must face the problem how    to handle information from different sources with different hotel management systems to different destinations.论文网

Web service becomes the tool to solve these problems. Our web services integrate the web server and hotel management system together, and everyone gets benefit. Booking a room easily anywhere and anytime becomes possible by using GHIRS. Consumer browses websites and finds hotel using his PC, PDA or mobile phone(WAP supported), after his identity is accepted, he can book a reservation.Two minutes later he can get the acknowledgement from the hotel by mobile phone textmessage or multimedia message,or email sent to his email account or just acknowledgement on the dynamic web page, if he hasn’t leave the website. The response time may take a little longer because when the hotel receives the quest, in some circumstance, hotel staff should check if there is clean and vacant room left. The web service is a standard interface that all travel agents can handle, gather and distribute the reservation information easily through internet.When the reservation request is acknowledged, hotel staff prepares the room,catering, and transportation for guests. Since the information already stored in the database, every part in the hotel chains can share it and work together properly. For example, staff in front office and housekeeping department can prepare room for guests according to the data, staff in back office can stock material for catering purpose and hotel manager can check business report in Enterprise Information Portal integrated with GHIRS by his browser. Then room rent-ratio reports, room status reports, daily income reports and other real time business reports are generated. Managers of the group can access any report of any hotel by the system. In the later part of this paper, we will show how consumers, agents, and hotel staff can efficiently work together by GHIRS .