Hotel reservation and billing system (HRBS)

Abstract

Uganda’s hotel industry since its inception has been providing accommodation services to clients who require these facilities. As a result, hotel practitioners have had to improve on their service delivery due to competition and technological changes within this industry. The development of hotels in Uganda is growing tremendously due to a number of reasons that range from political, economic and social changes. These factors have positively impacted the existence and development of this industry in Uganda. The management systems being used in Uganda’s hotel industry are both paper based and also involve automation of some business processes such as writing up weekly reports using Microsoft Word. Despite this automation, nearly all of the business activities are carried out using a paper based approach. To tackle this problem, the development of an automated management system was proposed. The Hotel Reservation & Billing System (HRBS) would manage the key processes with greater ease and simplicity. The project set out to develop the HRBS based on collected system requirements and specifications obtained by using different techniques including interviews, observations & questionnaires. The system was designed to cover the main functionalities of reservations and billing processes. This was modeled using DFD’s which were constructed using Microsoft Visio. The system was developed using various tools including Dreamweaver, Apache Web server and MySQL based on several technologies with HTML, PHP, JavaScript, CSS and SQL to run on client server architecture. The system will be accessed via a browser with two views, the primary view from where clients will be able to browse through the website. The second view will be accessed via a login form on the home page of the website. The adoption of this system would be valuable to hotel practitioners since such a system can help handle the ever increasing volumes of information. Additional functionalities can be incorporated which include virtual tours, security controls, and on line payment services.