Business to Business (B2B) Software Solution for Online Hotel Reservation: Bonotel

Abstract

Hotel reservation is one of key tasks in tourism industry. This is not only engaged with guaranteeing a room for traveler to spend a night but also is closely linked with other businesses: Airlines, Tour Operators, Wholesalers, Travel Inventory Distributors, Receptors, Event Planners and Destination Management companies. Hence, there is a high impact on developing an efficient hotel reservation system for effective customer service to travelers. Rezgateway is the worldwide leader in software for the travel industry. By using Rezgateway's range of services, customers can easily create, manage, integrate and distribute travel inventory using Internet technologies. This study is an attempt to develop an online hotel reservation system that promotes Business to Business (B2B) e-commerce model using Rezgateway. Under this study, four major development channels: Call Center, Shopping Cart, XML, Comma-Separated Values (CSV) files were identified as supportive components to create, manage, integrate and distribute multiple travel products: hotels, leisure activities and event planner, tickets management, transport, tour guides and itinerary management. The system was developed under agile environment. Major tasks under the system development are sprint item development, fixing live system issues, participate scrum planning and slicing sessions. The system basically divided into two categories: back office and web site, also, it subject to module [report/setup/contracts/search…] developments, module improvements based on client requirements and continuous system maintain in both web and back office in order to provide a good customer satisfaction. This study took Rezgateway and BONTEL portal as its case. It looked at creating an online hotel reservation system to enable customers choose the primary accommodations along with other services they wanted for better traveling experience. The system was successfully linked with several world’s famous hotel chains such as MGM Resorts, Leows Hotels, Fairmont Hotels and Resorts etc., as well as with third party suppliers like HotelBeds, Derbysoft, RateTiger etc.