Hotelsinone ( http://www.hotelsinone.ie/ ) offers the very best hotel deals throughout Ireland in a way that is uniquely tailored for the Irish Market. Hotelsinone is a website built for hotel guests by hotel people.

Pat O' Neill MD of Hotelsinone Ltd. asked iWorks to build him a complex Online Hotel Booking Engine which on one side would enable hotels to update rates and availability and on the, offer these rates to the general public in a timely fashion. The system was complex because there was a large amount of criteria on the frontend that needed to be taken into account in order for the system to pull the correct responses from the MySQL database.

After the technical specification was agreed on the hotel booking engine and both Perl and PHP was agreed as the development language, iWorks agreed to create 3 online Administration Areas and a Front End. The Administration Areas were for the Hotelsinone Staff, for the individual hotels and lastly for hotel chains.

The Front End

• The CSS was designed in tableless CSS. This is encouraged by the Search Engines and is looked upon favorably in their rankings. In addition CSS is generally quicker for page loading.
• A Calendar widget was built on the frontend to allow the General public to select dates and locations.
• In order to retrieve availability the system needed to
  • Pull the hotels that match the chosen location - County and / or Town
  • Check the hotel room availability between those date for each of these hotels based on the chosen rate. Hotelsinone have the ability to create up to 99 rates. An example of a rate would be Standard, Special or Mid-Week.
  • Check if any of the days were marked as closed for any of the hotels (closed out).
  • Check against each of the hotels whether there was a minimum or maximum amount of days that the user must stay for that period and to define if the user was within that quantity.
  • Check against the Master Hotel Availability for each of the chosen days.
  • Check against the availability of the chosen room(s).
  • It sounds like a miracle, but based on that criteria, hotels that suited the criteria are returned.
• As you can imagine, a lot of time and patience was spent optimizing the MySQL database and Perl code to ensure that after all those queries (sifting through millions of records) that the results would be up on the users browser within 2 seconds. That was achieved.
• Pat also asked iWorks if we could build in some form of hotel component that would make it easy for the Guest to cancel bookings and to automate the refund process and the hotel notification. This was completed with the addition of a few minor enhancements.
• As this was a start-up company it was essential that Hotelsinone capture as much visitor information as was possible. iWorks set them up on Google Analytics to track visitor movements. We created a few of our own routines so that Pat could see what dates people were searching on, and for what locations. In addition we created a sign-up process for interested visitors who wanted to be notified of special offers. We also built a e-Mail manager which allowed Hotelsinone to e-Mail directly to these customers from their own Administration Area.
• To facilitate the majority of our visitors we integrated the payment process with Realex and PayPal.
• A pdf invoice was sent out after each booking, and an SMS with their booking code was sent to those that supplied a mobile number.
• We dynamically created hotel pages ( a page for each hotel ), and using apache mod-rewrite we are able to change the URLs to a more human readable and search engine friendly name.
• After the site went live we were approached by Hotelsinone to add a few more components to the front and back end. One such example was the display of availability in each search result for each of the hotels for next 28 days by rate and room type. The upshot is that the customer could see the availability going forward and the prices. Our research suggests that 12% of bookings were extended by 1 or more days due to this feature.
• We also plugged in a Wordpress Blog to start driving traffic to the site.

The Hotel Administration Area

With security paramount we developed the following components in both Perl and PHP.

• A secure login.
• The ability to change some (not all) hotel details.
• The ability to manage hotel facility listings using features and items. Such as Restaurant with items Breakfast, Lunch, Evening meal or the feature Room - Internet Connection, iron etc. It allows each hotel the ability to highlight features and services which are unique to their hotel.
• The ability to manage the hotel Room Types
• The ability to manage rates (such as standard, special, mid-week)
• The ability to manage availability based on Room Type and Rate for two years in advance.
• The ability to manage prices based on Room Type and Rate for two years in advance.
• We also created a feature which would allow the hotel to print Guest Bookings, view statistics on bookings, visitors to their page, bounce rate etc.
• At the end of each month the system automatically e-Mails a full detailed report to each Hotel Administrator.

The Site Administration Area

• A custom CMS was built which allowed full content management for the frontend of the Site.
• The ability to create, amend and suspend Hotels.
• The ability to amend / create individual hotel room types, rates, availability and prices.
• The ability to create / amend and suspend Hotel Chains and assign hotels to them.
• Define and manage currencies and their currency value against the base which is euro.
• Define and manage system users and their rights.
• Define and manage facilities and items.
• A full e-Mail Manager.
• Manage customer bookings.
• An array of reports which covered the entire spectrum.

This project was built on time and within the initial budget.

For iWorks this was a really interesting project to work on, as it hammered home the importance of well structured database queries and correctly nominalised database tables. In this difficult climate it is rewarding to find that Hotelsinone.ie is continually reaching and exceeding its targets. iWorks is proud to partner with Hotelsinone.ie.