Solution for a travel agency

Accomodation records and other capacities

Accommodation

Records of accommodation facilities are able to keep a record of any facility from a seven-star hotel or ocean liner to a tented campsite.

The facility is described with a number of parameters, the system also keeps a record of the object description (including equipment and activities in the surrounding area) or pictures.

The hotel facilities are dealt with using a user-editable code list, so it is possible not only to record parameters such as size of the swimming pool or distance from the beach, but also to search by these parameters.

Purchase of quotas is registered in the form of contracts with the partner. The contract from the hotel may be transferred into the system – Purchase price per room in a certain period with a given number of capacities.

The system thereby keeps track of purchases of rooms at the price per person, per room and night or discounts related to children in a specific age range accompanied by an adult. We keep a record of discounts X for Y, discounts for a specific number of nights, the extra bed surcharge, room occupancy options and other parameters.

The capacities are recorded as:
• allotment
• guarantee
• on request

If one accommodation facility is purchased through more partners and with different contracts, the system still registers the fact that it is one facility. Likewise, the system keeps track of the reduction of the original capacity and additional orders, even in different price ranges.

Virtual units

If the user needs to work with units which are not suitable to be recorded in other parts of the system for various reasons, the inventory system may also work with a completely virtual unit that is not linked to anything.

We use the virtual units, for instance, to reduce the number of sold tours at a fixed group size by assigning the tour a fixed quota of virtual units „tour vacancies“.

General services

Apart from transport and accommodation, it is possible to keep a record of a number of other services in the system. For these records, we introduce a central catalogue of services which includes categories such as:
• arranging visas
• car rental
• trips
• transfers
• insurance
• airport and fuel surcharges for charters
• and the like

Each service may be, in addition to general characteristics, defined by a text description, pictures or attached files.

The service keeps a record of the relationship to other objects, such as countries and destinations, type of transport, accommodation etc. According to this definition, the service is then offered to be included in the product package or as an optional service at each reservation meeting the affiliation criteria.

Even a service may have purchased quotas of units at different prices and conditions, or it may exist as unlimited (e.g. arranging visas).

Wholesale purchases of semi-finished products

Records of purchased semi-finished products address the purchases of items from wholesale pricelists of other tour operators or other middlemen.

A number of purchased items may consist of other components, but it is not necessary to keep tracks of such a composition in the system. For the product manager, it is important to use the unit correctly in their own product package.

Reservations and purchases of these units usually take place automatically between more instances of the reservation system. Loading the wholesale pricelist is once again an automatic process.

Venues and cultural events

A quota of tickets to a cultural event or seats in the hall are another object that can be subjected to record keeping, purchases and resulting sales individually or in the form of a dynamic package.

Restriction on sales of units

Units in transport, accommodation, services and other records may be organized into groups with limited booking or sale options.

The restriction may be used for example in the following cases:

a) reservation of hotel capacities for a single wholesale partner.

b) reservation of tickets to sightseeing tours so that regular residence tours could not block putting together the sightseeing group.

c) reservation of spaces only for particular transport rotations for the sake of pairing seats on the line back and forth.

d) permission to sell individual or one-way tickets.

e) grouping of capacities on the basis of the number of nights to avoid discontinuous capacity utilization.

f) for cottage reservations, binding the rooms in the cottage on some dates so that it is possible to book only the whole cottage at once.

Different conditions are applied for different types of units. The quota of seats may be divided into groups and the sale of seats in these groups may be conditional. The operator may reserve part of the aircraft only for sightseeing tours and therefore ensure the capacity is not blocked for other activities. Sales restrictions of the group may be linked to the client’s time of return (for the sake of pairing tickets back and forth), to one-way tickets, to a wholesale partner etc.