CASE STUDY

A Camp Reservation System for Adventure Camping

As its name suggests, the primary business of Adventure Camping is in selling camping holiday packages to the general public. A typical camping holiday package consists of one or more tents and few essential items for a reserved period of time, maintained by the company in their own camping sites and other privately owned sites.

Typically, customers make their enquiries over the phone on forthcoming holiday packages from the Sales Desk at Adventure Camping. Their main duty is to go through the confirmed and pending reservations to check the availability of the interested package and negotiate with the customer about the dates and offer other packages if the required dates have already been reserved. If the interested package is available, customer is asked to provide his/her personal information and number of tents needed (two can share one tent) and then a pending reservation is made.

To confirm the pending reservation, customer is requested to settle the full payment to the Cashier at least 7 days prior to the reservation and collect the site-copy of the payment receipt from the Cashier. Otherwise the pending reservation will be expired. Cashier refers the pending reservations to accept payments and issue receipts. Once paid, Cashier stamps the corresponding pending reservation as “Paid”. She keeps the original payment receipt with herself for preparing the daily-collection summary to be sent to the management at the end of the day.

The Reservations Clerk goes through the pending reservations in every morning to extract the stamped and the expired reservations. For each stamped pending reservation, she makes a new reservation for the corresponding camping holiday package with customer’s particulars in pending reservation. Then the both stamped and expired pending reservations are discarded. For each confirmed reservation, she prepares a document known as booking-note, which consists of customer particulars, number of tents needed and other special remarks.

The relevant booking-note is handed over to a Courier to be sent to the Site Supervisor at the corresponding camping site to arrange the site to suite to the customer’s requirements. Customer can obtain above mentioned essential items provided by Adventure Camping by producing the site-copy of the payment receipt to the Site Supervisor at the time of check-in to the site.

Occasionally, the Reservations Clerk receives new site information from the management. Using such information, she prepares new camping holiday packages and makes them available for reservation. She also uses revised rates sent by the management to update the rates of the existing packages.

At present, the company carries out its day-to-day operations in a completely manual manner and the amount of paper work makes the system rather error-prone and inconvenient. Adventure Camping therefore, wants to computerize their reservation system not only to cover the present operations but also to meet their future demand. As a part of their high level strategic review, the management has identified the following major business problems experienced in the current system.

• It is inconvenient to go through the customer history to provide discounts for the regular customers.
• When the Reservation Clerk refers the confirmed or pending reservations, Sales Desk may have to hold all the incoming customer inquires till such information is available.
• When the pending reservations are in reference at the Sales Desk or at the Reservation Clerk, Cashier may have to ask the customers to wait at the counter till it is available for her reference.

Clearly many more business issues and requirements will be uncovered during the new computerization project, but it is highly expected to address the above problems with any proposed system. It is also nice to have the assistance of the new system for the management decision-making process with an array of statistical and OR analysis tools. Moreover, to address a worldwide audience, Adventure Camping is looking for new means of marketing, advertising and reservation.

The office staff of Adventure Camping is familiar with the software such as Microsoft Office and the company already has few IBM compatible PCs running on Windows Millennium Edition. Therefore, the management is keen in making use of existing hardware and software wherever possible in the new computerization project.

Assume that you are the system analyst of the consulting software firm hired by Adventure Camping for the development work and the site maintenance and payments for privately owned sites are out of the scope of the reservation system. Using SSADM, analyze and then design an information solution for their business problem.