Custom Hostel Front Desk Software

[Hostels]

This is a thread about bbdezine23's custom front desk software.

For more background information, please see the original hostel front desk software thread.

I haven't seen the software personally so this is not an endorsement one way or the other -- I am just posting the screenshots that were emailed to me:

[Hostels]

Here are a couple more screenshots:

[aboriginalhostel]

Originally Posted by Hostels

Here are a couple more screenshots:

Looks interesting... is there a demo version available for download?

[uktrail]

Thank you for the screen shots. They stimulate a number of important ideas.

These are the things that cross my mind as I think about it: You display a room and bed layout -- I would prefer to see each room on one line rather than in columns as shown; that's just personal preference, but you need to allow for different layouts to suit different users. But that is easy, it's simply displaying the same data in a different layout. You appear to be showing private rooms as if they are single beds; while they are indeed single bookings, they represent several people, and you might need to consider the beds separately if you want to analyse total nrs of guests, or how many were under-18s at a lower rate, or indeed you may on some occasions treat the room as a dorm.

From the System Analyst's viewpoint, the core of the system is the set of databases and what is stored in them. The first stage of building the project, in my view, is to design the data storage. The screen displays are obviously highly important and they have to be made user-friendly etc, but these can be thought of as windows on the databases, and in principle you can have as many of them as you like, or many different varieties of them to suit different users' tastes. (The software called Lotus Approach, which I used some years ago, makes this point very clearly and I think clarifies one's understanding of the setup -- Databases in the background, Windows to extract the info from them in any combination and display it in any layout.)

You mention the modules for maid service and maintenance services. These are indeed useful. At first glance they appear to be self-contained units. Do they interact with the front desk system? All I can think of, offhand, is that cleaning needs to be done only on the rooms that were occupied last night, so the maid service module needs to download a list of those rooms from the front desk data. Are there other ways in which they interact? I guess there are money inputs and outputs from each module, and perhaps you gather these together in a Balance Sheet module somewhere? If so, there are other financial items such as wages for desk staff, fuel and laundry, etc etc, and......so the thing builds up. Maybe you've got all these somewhere, but if not, some people will want them.

[bbdezine23]

The main grid displays a list of beds in the hostel, this is grouped by room type. Each bed is treated seperately, and book as such. The system uses a SQL backend, so the core of the system is very extensive. The maid and maintenance modules are part of the system, they are fully intergrated in the system. Rooms are marked as dirty when someone checks out and this shows up on the maids list, when the maid cleans the room the room is checked back in and ready for a booking. The maintenance module work the same way.


If you would like more information please let me know. Email me at bbdezine23@aol.com