Case Study 4: Royal Hotel Management

Royal hotel started its operations in California five years back. An inclination towards
customer delight has been a tradition for Royal hotel. Royal hotel’s excellent services and
world-class amenities have now increased its market share to almost 18%. The success story
continues because Royal Hotel has always tended to introduce innovative ideas and policies
to enhance its customer base.

At present Royal Hotel provides three types of suites to its customers, which are listed in the
following table.

Type of Room No. of Rooms Price per day ($)

Presidential Suite 50 200
Executive Suite 40 300
Luxury Suite 30 400

Royal Hotel Suite Details

The hotel has various departments, such as house keeping department for maintenance of
rooms such that cleaning and other activities are taken care of. A report for house keeping is
maintained so that personnel can be rotated for duty.

The departmental structure of Royal Hotel is displayed as follows.

Departmental Structure of Royal Hotel

Current System
Royal Hotel’s overall management is controlled by the General Manager and is subsequently
divided into different departments.

Rooms
This includes:
 Front desk / front office: The booking assistant handles the front desk operations, such
as inquiries, booking, and cancellation of rooms. The booking assistant performs the
manual room reservation according to the customer demand, personally or on the
phone. At present, Royal Hotel maintains various files for hotel reservation system.
When a customer arrives to check for availability of rooms or book rooms with hotel, a
confirmation number is given to the customer for his booking. The booking assistant
checks for the availability of rooms according to the arrival time and departure time
provided by the customer and creates a reservation report. The booking assistant also
enquires whether or not the customer wants pickup facility.
 House keeping: The housekeeping assistant manages the cleanliness of rooms and
takes care of the on-duty staff for individual rooms by using a manual entry of things in
a Cleaning Status file, as shown in the following table.

Room No. Floor No. Status Assigned To

101 1 Cleaned Adachi

102 1 Not Cleaned Aheam

103 1 Cleaned Daniels

104 1 Not Cleaned Kim

105 2 Cleaned Morgan

106 2 Not Cleaned Kim

107 2 Cleaned Mukuji

108 2 Not Cleaned Smith

109 3 Cleaned Thompson

110 3 Not Cleaned Taylor

111 3 Cleaned Wright

112 3 Not Cleaned Lipsey

113 4 Cleaned Smith

114 4 Not Cleaned Taylor

115 4 Cleaned Lombardo

116 4 Not Cleaned Morgan

 Cleaning Status File

The house keeping assistant is responsible for updating the Cleaning Status file at the
interval of every 4 hours.

Food and Beverages

This includes:
 Kitchen: The kitchen assistant/chef manages a Daily Menu file for the regular and
occasional dishes to be prepared. The kitchen assistant also manages individual
food-orders made by the customers.
 Banquet: The banquet assistant manages the banquet activities, such as party
organization, booking and cancellation of banquet.
 Room service: The room service includes the individual requests made by the
customers regarding food and other articles, such as laundry.
 Restaurants: The restaurants include the management of food and servicing for the
customers and guests.
 Lounges: The lounges include the management of the services provided to the
customers in the lounges.

Miscellaneous Operating Departments

This includes:
 Business center: The business development (BD) assistant maintains a business
promotion department, which has its main focus on the development and enhancement
of the hotel’s business. The BD assistant handles the various promotion activities, such
as special discount offers, holiday packages, and executive seminars.
 On-site shops: The on-site shops include sale of different products by providing on-site
shops inside the hotel area.
 Fitness center: The health trainer manages the health equipment and services to the
fitness-conscious customers. The health trainer also schedules occasional fitness
seminars and other related activities to achieve customer satisfaction.
 Parking and others: The management of the customer and hotel vehicles is looked
after by the transportation assistant. The transportation assistant also handles the pick
and drop facility for the customers of the hotel.

Envisioned System
The existing system needs to be computerized which would result in fast telephonic or
personal inquiries about availability of rooms in Royal Hotel. The booking assistant verifies
the availability of rooms in the computer and if the rooms are available, reserves that room
for that customer. A new system needs to be developed for Royal Hotel where every
department is interlinked. Each department should be automated as a separate interdependent
module in the application. This new system should accomplish the following functions:
 The authorized staff of the hotel can log into the application by using different logins,
such as manager and assistant, to perform various activities, such as create and view
users.
 The housekeeping department should allow the housekeeping assistant to view and
manage the cleaning status of the rooms. The housekeeping assistant should be able to
generate a report for the cleaning status of the rooms. The report should also include the
name of the respective cleaning staff associated with a room. Moreover, it should
provide the functionality to sort the contents of the cleaning report according to
different criteria, such as floor number and staff on duty.
 The housekeeping department should allow the housekeeping assistant or the manager
to manage employee details, such as adding, updating, and deleting employee records.
 The housekeeping department should also allow the users to enter and view
announcements stored in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) or text file for the
hotel staff.

While accepting room reservation data, all necessary validations should be performed. For
example, the system should check whether the room of a specific type is available for
booking for the time duration specified by the customer. In addition, the following tasks
should be performed:
 A unique confirmation number should be generated for each reservation process.
 In case of cancellation, the system should accept the confirmation number, validate the
confirmation number and should perform the cancellation process.
 The system should generate the room reservation report.

In order to develop the software system for Royal hotel, you need to analyze the existing
system and create a design for the envisioned system. The new system can be designed by
using a 3-tier architecture and developed by using the following components:
 Presentation tier: This layer consists of Windows Forms. The Forms can be used for
accepting the data and displaying the final results to the users. In addition, it can be
used to generate various reports, such as room booking, cleaning status, and kitchen
expenses, depending upon the user requests.
 Business logic layer tier: This layer contains the code to provide the logic to create the
Royal hotel management system.
 Data tier: This layer consists of the SQL Server 2005 database to store the relevant
data.
Following is the ER diagram for the envisioned system.

ER diagram for the Envisioned System

The whole hotel management system needs to be computerized. The files for the
presentation tier and the data tier have been created by different groups of the software
development team. You being a part of the software development team have been assigned
with the task of creating the House Keeping Module of the Royal Hotel management system.
The following tasks are for immediate implementation:
1. Implement the functionality on the Login page to validate user credentials and provide
the user with appropriate features and functionality. For example, the user who logs in
as a clerk is not allowed viewing or managing employee details.
2. Implement the functionality on the Home page to enable the user to be redirected on the
House Keeping form. A message should be displayed on the page that “The hotel
management system is under construction”. Only the Housekeeping menu option will
be enabled and other menu options, such as Kitchen, Banquets, and Room Service are
disabled.
3. Implement the functionality on the House Keeping page to view the cleaning status
report conatining the room number, floor number, status, and assigned to columns.
4. Implement the functionality on the House Keeping page to update the cleaning status of
the hotel rooms.
5. Implement the functionality on the Manage Employees page to allow the user to search
employee details, such as name, designation, address, telephone, fax, e-mail, and ID.
The search could be done on the basis of name or designation.
6. Implement the functionality on the Manage Employees page to perform various
activities, such as addition, updation, and deletion of employee records.
7. The House Keeping department should also allow the users to enter and view
announcements, which should be stored in Extensible Markup Language (XML) or text
file for the hotel staff.