Corporate Reservation Systems (CRS) is an independent agency that books approximately 100,000 hotel rooms each year on behalf of it's corporate clients. CRS pre-negotiates special rates with some 15,000 hotels worldwide, offers these discounted rates to their clients then organises all the bookings and the paperwork. CRS do not charge for this service but instead receives a commission from the hotels. In addition to accommodation they also organise conferences and special events.

CRS were using an old DOS FoxPro system to take bookings. This had performed well in the past but it was now creaking at the seams and needed to be replaced with a new Windows system designed to handle the increased needs of the now larger and more sophisticated organization. The overall brief was to develop a more efficient Windows based replacement to take hotel bookings, conference bookings and to organize special events. Multiple guests may be included on each booking and each guest may potentially require different types of accommodation. In some instances guest names are not known and pre-bookings are made for later confirmation. Bookings may also be altered at any time and the system need the ability to cope with this high degree of change and uncertainty.

Details of the original booking, booking changes, confirmations, etc. needed to be communicated to both hotels and clients in a speedy and efficient manner, either by fax or by e-mail. This process had to be fully automatic with no manual typing in of fax numbers or e-mail addresses and had to be capable of coping with thousands of messages a day.

As well as hotel bookings the system also had to handle special events and conferences including accommodation, seminar rooms, projectors, refreshments, meals, etc.

As clients were being dealt with on the phone call centre functionality was required and the system needed to be able to retrieve data quickly and efficiently as well as being easy to use.

Sophisticated accounting capabilities were also required. CRS needed to be able to invoice either an individual hotel or to consolidate invoices together for all hotels within a chain and then invoice the parent company. Invoices included full details of the bookings together with CRS's agreed commission rates. Multi-currency support was required for both the original bookings and the subsequent invoices. An individual invoice therefore needed to be able to cope with multiple countries, multiple hotels, multiple clients, multiple bookings, multiple currencies, multiple commission rates and multiple VAT rates! If this was not enough the system needed to be flexible enough to cope with a hotel transferring from one hotel chain to another in the middle of an accounting period. Other accounts requirements include logging payments, generating statements, catering for over-payments and under-payments, issuing credit notes, coping with very complex VAT requirements, handling disputed payments, allowing for write-offs and month & year end consolidation routines. Invoices also needed to be exported to a separate electronic Word document for permanent storage.

A client loyalty scheme was required allowing clients to build up points for each booking that was made. Points could then be swapped for a wide range of vouchers (eg from M&S) or could be donated to charity - in the latter case receipts were generated and sent to the client to show that this had been done.

All of this then had to be tied together with a comprehensive Management Information system so that it was as easy to get an overview of the business as it was to drill down for more and more detailed information.

One major consideration was the Business Critical nature of this system. Most bookings were made in real-time over the telephone and almost all the staff were totally reliant upon it's continuous and correct operation. Any disruption would have had serious consequences hence a reliable, high quality solution was essential.

Aldex was asked to design a new system to meet these requirements.