Centralized Lodging Reservation System for Multi-Site Room Availability
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing lodging reservation systems face limitations in managing vacant rooms across multiple sites, leading to users being unable to reserve rooms at specific sites despite availability elsewhere, and hotels struggle to promptly update cancellations, resulting in inefficient reservation management.
Innovation Solution
A reservation system that utilizes two computers: one for user terminals to input and store reservation data, and another to manage vacancy data across multiple facilities, allowing real-time updates and adjustments of available rooms, enabling users to reserve rooms across multiple sites and hotels, and ensuring accurate reflection of cancellations.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If the number of rooms allotted to each reservation site is limited, then the reservation system can manage room allocation efficiently, but users cannot reserve vacant rooms at specific sites even when other sites have available rooms
Solution Approach 1:
The second computer is designed to manage vacancy data for multiple facilities (both specific and non-specific), enabling it to serve multiple reservation sites universally. This allows the system to handle room allocation across different sites through a single centralized management point, resolving the contradiction between limited allotment and user flexibility.
Solution Approach 2:
The second computer acts as an intermediary between the first computer (reservation system) and the multiple facilities. It receives vacancy data from various hotels, processes it centrally, and provides updated information back to the reservation system, enabling dynamic room allocation across sites without manual intervention at each location.
2Reliability
If each hotel manages its own reservation updates independently, then hotels can control their own data, but cancellation updates cannot be reflected promptly across all reservation sites
Solution Approach 1:
The second computer continuously receives and processes vacancy data from multiple facilities in real-time, maintaining an always-updated central repository of room availability. This continuous operation ensures that cancellations and new reservations are reflected immediately across all connected reservation sites, eliminating delays associated with periodic or manual updates.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements a feedback mechanism where the second computer sends updated vacancy information back to the first computer after processing changes. This feedback loop ensures that reservation sites receive real-time updates about room availability and cancellations, maintaining data accuracy while enabling rapid propagation of changes across the network.
3Ease of operation
If multiple reservation sites manage rooms independently, then each site can control its own allocation, but the system cannot properly manage remaining vacant rooms across all sites
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the vacancy data management function across all facilities into a single centralized system (the second computer). This consolidation combines information from multiple independent sources into one unified database, preventing information loss while preserving the operational autonomy of individual sites through networked access to the central system.
Data Source
AI summary
A reservation system for lodging has a first computer and a second computer, in which the first computer has data of available facilities and accepts user's input of lodging date and facility, and the second computer that accesses the first computer through a network and manages vacancy data of facilities. The second computer accesses a plurality of the first computers and their databases to search available facilities, and is capable of accessing other first computers for searching and reserving available facilities. Situation where reservation is not made even when a vacant room is available is prevented by accessing a plurality of the first computers.