Hotel Metropole Reservations

Inspired by Hotel Metropole, a luxury Belgian hotel, our team built a reservations management system as a capstone project for a business applications development course.

Summary

I worked with Precious Price and Rachel Chen to develop the system in Visual Basic over eight weeks. The system enabled hotel staff to make reservations, manage the price and supply of rooms, and view a filterable report about the hotel's occupancy.

Initial Interface Drafts

Challenges

After receiving the business requirements, our team's main task was breaking down the components needed for our system. This included the main menu, displayed at the start of the application and used for navigation, a new reservations form that allowed the front desk to generate quotes and reserve rooms, a room management tool to display the price and quantity of room types, and a report to search past and existing reservations. We also needed the ability to store, read, and write data.

Next, we needed to design and test the interface. Aesthetic discrepancies in our first draft, such as shifting window sizes, inconsistent menus, and button placement, were distracting to the user. More importantly, it did not meet our end goal of being easy to use.

Final Application

Solutions

To perfect the reservation system, our team needed to test as much as possible. So, we set aside the design for a moment and began to block out the pseudocode to see what else we had ahead of us. After seeking feedback from classmates and our professor, we were able to translate our new perspective on feasibility into the interface.

For example, we decided to display each room type at once on our room management form rather than forcing the user to click through a dropdown or cycle through many windows. This required a creative approach to coding our application, as StreamWriter lacked functionality to update a single line of data. Instead, we programmed the object to read the data, modify as needed, and then rewrite the entire file again. Similarly, for the reservation reports, we optimized the report to read from a listbox, completely changing our approach on how we related the data file to the interface.

In our evaluation, the professor awarded us an A+ and commented that we had "a very pleasing design and presentation overall across the entire project" and our team "can be proud of its work."

Access the project's pseudocode and source on GitHub.

Learnings

Validate everything. Even for an application as small as ours, it felt like there were millions of details to consider. Every test run revealed another minor detail, like a misaligned pixel or a rearranged tab order. The best thing our team was able to practice was running so many iterations that our solution was nearly error-proof given the timeline.