NetPlus on the Web The Company
Based in North London, and established in 1993, HotelConnect is a hotel-booking agency offering hotel accommodation in over 80 major European cities. Their services are used not only by the general public but also by travel agencies all over the UK and Europe.
Acting as a call centre, HotelConnect had traditionally handled hotel bookings and enquiries via the phone by a team of approximately 30 staff, all locally networked to access HotelConnect's Reservation system, an application written in DataEase for Windows (DFW) by Jocelyn Droppa, HotelConnect's IT manager.
The Challenge
With business trends shifting towards e-commerce and Internet services, HotelConnect was soon faced with the "Internet challenge". Jocelyn comments: "There came a point where the Internet was the way businesses were moving and as we received more requests from our customers to book hotel rooms via the Web, we decided it was time to Web enable our reservations application."
Jocelyn approached Sapphire's consultancy team to evaluate Sapphire's offerings. Jocelyn's main requirement was to web-enable the current application, whilst maintaining overall consistency: "I didn't want a shrink-wrapped package, I wanted a product in which I was able to develop and enhance, whilst maintaining what we already had with DFW." This left no doubt that NetPlus, the enterprise wide e-commerce client/server RAD environment, was the best choice.
The Solution
Working as a team, Sapphire's consultants and Jocelyn were able to migrate HotelConnect's data to Sybase and convert the original DFW application into NetPlus.
According to Jocelyn, "NetPlus proved even more flexible than DFW and offered a familiar environment for our users resulting in a system similar to our original one but much more powerful."
Once the conversion was complete, the next stage of implementation was to Web enable HotelConnect's reservation system for restricted access by travel agencies only, in a typical B2B (Business to Business) situation. This was achieved by using ASP (Active Server Pages) to query the data directly and as a result, HotelConnect's Web deployed registration system was well received by the Travel Agencies.
Following on from this successful implementation and as an existing provider of a telephone service to GO customers, the popular airline company, HotelConnect decided to bid to become GO's hotel reservation agency on GO's Website, thus giving access to HotelConnect's central reservation system to the general public. GO's main requirement was the ability to handle a large number of concurrent enquiries whilst providing fast results.
A long competition between GO's other suppliers ensued, with bidders having to prove their site would be able to cope with the expected peak traffic by testing it with over 1000 virtual users per hour. HotelConnect's solution was successful and again, Sapphire was commissioned to provide HotelConnect's central reservation system for GO's customers on the Go-fly.com Website, this time in a B2C (Business to Consumer) arrangement.
The outcome
In August 2000, the Go-HotelConnect.com reservation system went live and within 10 minutes the first hotel room was booked. This page has since been much visited and attracts an average of 200,000 hits (page reads) per month with approximately 30,000 unique hits. An average of 30 reservations a day are now booked online, almost doubling HotelConnect's original bookings.
HotelConnect's staff can now concurrently query and enter data into Sybase via NetPlus together with hundreds or thousands of users entering their details via the Web. All in all an extremely successful example of how NetPlus helped an organisation to increase their productivity and efficiency.