SANDY GULLS BEACH PARK

Sandy Gulls Beach Park



Sandy Gulls Beach Park

Introduction

This paper attempts to build the framework for an innovative Hotel Management System for Sandy Gulls Beach Park. The proposed Hotel Management System is a cross-plat formed, dynamically distributed system that is modular, self-healing, plug-and-play enabled, and that allows for adaptive parallelism. In addition, this thesis attempts to use biometrics identification methods for access control, as opposed to the traditional method of using physical tokens.

The design we propose is technologically driven. Therefore, it is only appropriate where the marginal cost of providing a service via technology is less than the marginal cost of providing an equivalent service via non-technological means. For example, providing a method of taking room-service food orders via computer may not be viable in developing countries, where the cost of leasing a computer is more than the cost of paying a butler to service every room. On the other end of the spectrum, international five-star hotel chains with their own Hotel Management Systems with features such as centralized reservations will probably show little interest in our thesis. This thesis neither details a cost-effective way to integrate with their legacy systems, nor does it propose a solution that takes advantage of the same economies of scale as they do (Anthony, 2005, 45).

Thus, the focus is to provide a solution for the middle range of hotels, such as a four-star hotel chain, for whom currently available technology is affordable and can also provide valuable services to bring them on par with the five-star hotels. In line with this focus, the proposed implementation uses inexpensive off-the-shelf components, such as inexpensive desktops and servers, to keep hardware costs low. The system is a plug-and-play solution with a modular design to keep installation, maintenance, and upgrading costs low. The solution is also designed for distributed computing with each computer working in parallel so that it can compete with the computational power of the large five-star hotels with more expensive computer equipment. The distributed computing platform is both dynamic and self-healing so that an isolated failure will not bring the demise of the entire system, thus providing the robustness demanded by hotels. The solution is cross plat formed, so that it can use any operating system (preferably the one that offers the most value). Finally, the solution is web-enabled and scalable to allow for a hotel to grow into a hotel chain.

Discussion

Much of the features in our initial prototype cater to the needs of Sandy Gulls, which fortunately shares many similar features as our target four-star hotel. For example, Sandy Gulls housekeeping policies are reflective of a typical hotel of the same size. Depending on the season, there are three full time maids, and anywhere from ten to fifteen part-time maids. One of their duties is a .full clean of an apartment room when the guests checks out, which takes an average of 30 minutes. On the other hand, a partial clean for a guest that stays overnight takes an average ...