Mobile Application & Back-End Server Management Tools for Hotel Reservations

Abstract

This project aims at creating a flexible Online Reservation System through a mobile plat-form application which can be used by a small or medium (Small to Medium Enterprises-SME) hotel. With the introduction and the evolution of mobile operation systems (such as Android) , mobile applications, and of the World Wide Web of course, online transactions are now very popular and prove to be more reliable than the traditional manual file systems since they speed up the booking process and reduce the problems of duplicate bookings. Nowadays a great part of the population owns a Smartphone and over 60 per cent of that part owns an Android Smartphone. This fact combined with the ubiquity of web servers makes android applications very popular and easy to use from a prospective client who wants to make a fast, easy and reliable reservation, and attracts the attention of many com-mercial entities. The travel and tourism industry in particular, is very popular with regard to making online reservations from mobile applications for hotel rooms, airline seats, etc. This new system should enable guests to make reservations from anywhere around the world from their android mobile smartphone. The implementation of this mobile reservation system is designed to replace the current, to eliminate the problems faced by the manual fil-ing system used by the hotel and provide a continuous and direct contact and relationship between client and hotel. Developing software systems is becoming more common today and developers always search for ways to develop systems faster and to eliminate the problem of repetitive code in the development process. This can be achieved by using application frameworks. Application frameworks (usually named development environments) are collections of abstract classes that are adapted and extended to create application systems. They help by reducing the amount of code that had to be written when developing an application system. Frameworks take all the complexities of interacting with the operating system and simplify them for the user. Eclipse, a full Java integrated development environment (IDE) with advanced features for developing, debugging, and packaging Android applications, was used in our case in or-der to develop the hotel’s android application.