WEB SERVICES IN HOTEL INDUSTRY

Yang Xiang, Mingjun Lan, Wanlei Zhou

School of Information Technology, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Hwy, Burwood 3125 VIC, Australia

Keywords: Web services, Integration, Hotel industry, Distributed system

Abstract: The hotel industry is in need of efficient, integrated, and economic supply chains and circulation processes.

This paper introduces a project of integration of hotel management systems by web services technology. We

discuss how web services will consent to the hotel industry by automating product distributions and

providing better services to buyers, suppliers, and prospective partners. The project, Group Hotel Integration

Reservation System (GHIRS), integrates many hotel industry systems such as Enterprise Information

System (EIS), Enterprise Information Portal system (EIP), Customer Relationship Management system

(CRM) and Supply Chain Management system (SCM) together. Evaluation of this project and comparison

with other systems are discussed. We conclude that although web services technology faces some

challenges, it is a potential tool that brings hotel industry increasing profits.

1 INTRODUCTION

Web services technology is a set of standards that

work for the next generation business applications

around the world. Many commercial software

systems extend their capability and power by using

web services technology. By web services

technology, today’s E-commerce is not merely using

internet to transfer business data or supporting

people to interact with dynamic web page, but are

fundamentally changed.

Web services technology allows the business

applications to exchange data easily. The World

Wide Web Consortium's eXtensible Markup

Language (XML) (W3C, 2003a) and the eXtensible

Stylesheet Language (XSL) (W3C, 2003b) are

standards defined in the interest of multi-purpose

publishing and content reuse and are increasingly

being deployed in the construction of web services.

Since XML is looked as the canonical message

format, it could tie together thousands of systems

programmed by hundreds of programming

languages. It provides applications with great

integration and interoperability. Any program can be

mapped into web service, while any web service can

also be mapped into program (Newcomer, 2002).

In this paper, we discuss the issues of web

services in hotel industry. We present a web services

commercial system in hotel industry that is Group

Hotel Integration Reservation System (GHIRS). It

fully integrates the hotel Front Office system,

Property Management System, Customer

Relationship Management System, Quality

Management system, Back Office system and

Central Reservations System distributed in different

locations. And we found that this system greatly

improves both the hotel customer and hotel officer’s

experiences in the hotel business work flow.

Currently in hotel industry there are few truly

integrated systems used because there are so many

heterogeneous systems already exist and scalability,

maintenance, price, security issues then become

huge to be overcome. From our study, there are still

challenges to integrate different hotel industry

business systems together, although our system is

one of few integration solutions to add or expand

hotel software system in any size of hotel chains

environment.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows.

Firstly we briefly introduce current web services

technology, then describe a scenario of hotel

reservation and discuss the interaction between

GHIRS and human. After that we analyse details of

the design and implementation of this system. The

result and implications of the evaluation studies on

the development of GHIRS are shown in the later

part. Finally we discuss some problems still need to

be improved and possible future directions of web

services in hotel industry.

231

Xiang Y., Lan M. and Zhou W. (2004).

WEB SERVICES IN HOTEL INDUSTRY.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on E-Business and Telecommunication Networks, pages 231-237

DOI: 10.5220/0001404702310237

 SciTePress

2 WEB SERVICES TECHNOLOGY

Currently there are many definitions of web services

technology. Here we are not going to give a specific

definition of it; however, we concentrate the

applicable advantages of web services in hotel

industry. That is it allows different systems

exchange data easily by XML standard. It has

several components, which include XML, (Simple

Object Access Protocol) SOAP, (Web Services

Description Language) WSDL, and (Universal

Description, Discovery and Integration) UDDI.

The format for web services to exchange is

XML, instead of HTML or other formats. They are

transmitted by using SOAP, which in fact can use

HTTP underneath the covers. UDDI is the term that

refers to the equivalent of a search engine server, but

instead of using it to find a web page, applications

use it to find other applications. And much like web

search engines that show a “snippet” or synopsis of

the hits for a search request, WSDL is the

description of the services provided by an

application.

The most outstanding feature of web services is

the promise of interoperability. The web services

architecture is based on sending XML message in a

specific SOAP format. XML message can be

transferred from one system to another easily, no

matter what kind of system it is and no matter where

the message comes from or goes to. So web services

technology can help hotel management system

overcome the traditional boundaries of location,

operating system, language, protocol, and so on.

3 A SCENARIO OF HOTEL

RESERVATION

In the GHIRS project, we developed a Group Hotel

Integration Reservation System (GHIRS). Our initial

thinking to develop GHIRS is to minimize the

human interaction with the system. Since GHIRS is

flexible and automated, it offers clear benefits for

both hotel customers and hotel staffs, especially for

group hotel customers and group hotel companies.

Group hotel companies usually have lots of hotels,

restaurants, resorts, theme parks or casinos in

different locations. For example, Shangri-La group

has hundreds of hotels in different countries all over

the world. These groups have certain customers who

prefer to consume in hotels belong to the same group

because they are membership of the group and have

personal profiles.

We deployed GHIRS in many large hotel

groups, which have many 4 to 5-star hotels locate in

different cities. This next generation hotel

management system saves the hotel group running

cost, provide their customers better services and

make hotels more profits spontaneously. To

customers, the system not only saves their time but

also saves money.

Figure 1 shows a scenario of hotel reservation.

The first step is that the consumer plans and looks

for a hotel according the location, price or whatever

his criteria and then decides the hotel. Then he

makes a reservation by telephone, fax, internet, or

mail to the hotel, or just through his travel agent.

When hotel staffs received the request, they first

look if they can provide available services. If there is

enough resource in the hotel, they prepare the room,

catering and transportation for the request and send

back acknowledgement. At last the guest arrives and

checks in. The business flow is quite simple;

however, to accomplish all these tasks is

burdensome for both the consumer side and the hotel

side without an efficient and integrated hotel

management system.

Figure 1: A scenario of hotel reservation

Guests can contact hotels by telephone or fax at

any time and any place. However, it costs much

when the hotel is far away from the city where the

guest lives; especially the hotel locates in a different

country. More over, if there is a group of four or five

people to make reservation together, it would take a

long time for hotel staff to record all the information

they need. Making reservation by travel agent saves

consumers’ time and cost, but there is still millions

of work for agent to do. They gather the

requirements from consumers, then distribute to

proper destination hotels. Because these hotels don’t

use the same system (these thousands of hotels may

use hundreds of management systems), someone,

agent or hotel staff, must face the problem how to

handle information from different sources.

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232

Web services technology becomes the tool to

solve these problems. By our web service project

that integrates the web server and hotel management

system together, everyone gets benefit. Booking a

room easily anywhere and anytime becomes

possible by using GHIRS. Consumer browses the

internet and finds hotel by his PC, PDA or mobile

phone (WAP supported), after his identity is

accepted, he can book a reservation. Two minutes

later he can get the acknowledgement from the hotel

by mobile phone text message or multimedia

message, email sent to his email account or just

acknowledgement on the dynamic web page, if he

hasn’t leave the website. The response time may

takes a little longer because when the hotel receives

the quest, in some circumstance, the staffs should

check if there is clean and vacant room left. The web

service is a standard interface that all travel agents

can handle, gather and distribute the reservation

information easily through internet. When the

reservation request is acknowledged, hotel staffs

prepare the room, catering, and transportation for

guests. Since the information already stored in the

database, every part in the hotel chains can share it

and work together properly. For example, staffs in

front office and housekeeping department can

prepare room for guests according to the data, staffs

in back office can stock material for catering

purpose and hotel manager can check business

report in Enterprise Information Portal integrated

with GHIRS by his browser. In the later part of this

paper, we will show how consumers, agents, and

hotel staffs can efficiently work together by GHIRS.

GHIRS is scalable for small-to-large hotel chains

and management companies, especially good for

hotel group. It truly soars with seamless connectivity

to global distribution systems thereby offering

worldwide reservation access. It also delivers real-

time, on line reservations via the Internet.

4 INTEGRATION OF HOTEL

MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

4.1 Existed System

The GHIRS system is developed on the base of an

existed hotel management system, Foxhis

. In

China, Foxhis

shares the largest part of software

market in hotel industry. Foxhis

version 5 has

distributed Client/Server architecture that the server

runs Sco-UNIX and client runs Microsoft Windows

and it use Sybase database on UNIX. The system

includes Front Office system, Property Management

system, Quality Management system, Human

Resource Management system, Enterprise

Information Portal system (EIP), Customer

Relationship Management system (CRM) and

Supply Chain Management system (SCM) as it is

shown in figure 2.

Figure 2: Foxhis

family

Foxhis

is largely based on intranet

environment. Most of the work is done in a single

hotel by the hotel staffs. It’s no customer self-

service. If a consumer wants to book a room, the

hotel staff must help the guest to record his request,

although Foxhis

system already done lots of

automatic job. When the systems are deployed in

different hotels that are parts of a group, sharing the

data becomes a problem. Just as an example, if the

group has ten hotels, there would be at least ten local

databases to store the consumers’ data. Because

hotels need real-time respond of the system, so these

ten hotels can’t deploy a central database that is not

locate in the same network. Thus one guest may

have different records in different hotels and the

information can not be shared. By web service as an

interface, these data can be exchanged easily.

4.2 Design

The consumers of hotel industry could be divided

into two categories. One is membership of hotel

group, who holds different classes of membership

cards and gains benefits like discount or special

offers. These consumers usually contribute a large

part of the hotel’s profit then are looked as VIP. The

hotel keeps their profiles, preferences and

membership account status. The other category is

common guest. All these two kinds of guests and the

travel agent who may trade with many other hotels

face the interface that let them to make a reservation.

For the common guest, the system just requires him

to input his reservation information such as guest

name, contact information, arrival and departure

WEB SERVICES IN HOTEL INDUSTRY

233

date, room type, number of room, and preference

etc. Then his request is submitted to the system. The

central processing server then distributes the

information to the appropriate hotel. Since web

service is so good for submitting documents to long

running business process flows, hotel staffs could

easily handle this data in and out of database

management system and application server. As the

membership of hotel, user just input his member id

and password, room information, arrival and

departure date, then finish the request. Because

hotels keep members’ profile, and systems exchange

profile across all hotels of the group by web service,

hotel staffs in different hotels could know the

guest’s individual requirement and provide better

services.

The agents work for consumers get benefits from

GHIRS as well. They may also keep the consumers’

profile and the web service interface is open to them,

it is easy to bridge their system to hotel management

system. Before GHIRS is deployed, the agents

should separate and process the reservation data and

distribute it to different hotels, which is an onerous

job. But now the agents could just press one button

and all the hotel reservation is sent to destination.

Hotel staffs receive all the requests from

different sources. Some policies are applied to

response the request. For example, some very

important guest’s request is passed automatically

without confirmation, the guest could get

acknowledgement in very short time. It triggers all

the chains of the hotel business flow and all the

preparation work is done before his arrival. But for

the common customer, hotel staffs would check on

the anticipate date if there is vacant and clean rooms

available. Because all the Foxhis

components are

integrated together, staffs users needn’t change

computer interface to check the room status. If it is a

valid request with enough guests’ information and

there is enough room left, a confirmation is sent

back. If there is not enough vacant room available,

hotel staffs will ask if guest would like to wait a time

or transfer to other hotels in the hotel group or

alliance hotels.

4.3 Implementation

There are many platforms that could provide

capabilities to integrate different system and offer

other features such as security and work load

balancing. The two main commercial campaigns are

Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and

Microsoft.NET. They offer pretty much the same

laundry of list of features, albeit in different ways.

J2EE works on any operating system while .NET

core works on Windows only but theoretically

supports development in many languages (once sub-

/supersets of these languages have been defined and

IL compilers have been created for them). We

choose .NET platform as our programming

environment, however, here we don’t advocate

which platform is better or not. Our target is to

integrate these decentralized and distributed systems

together. In fact, both of these platforms support

XML and SOAP to accomplish our task.

We use Microsoft Internet Information Services

(IIS) as web server and Sybase database server. The

firewalls separate the local networks from the public

networks. This is very important from the security

point of view. Each hotel of the group has a database

server, an application server and a web server to

deploy this multi-tier system that includes the user

interface presentation tier, business presentation tier,

business logical tier, and the data access tier. C# is

adopted as the programming language for the core

executable part. XML is the data exchange standard

format. The following XML file shows an example

of the reservation information of a guest. By using

XML, the information can go freely through

different system.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<xs:schema id="NewDataSet" xmlns=""

xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"

xmlns:msdata="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xml-

msdata">

<xs:element name="NewDataSet"

msdata:IsDataSet="true" msdata:Locale="en-AU">

……

<rcReserveLog diffgr:id="rcReserveLog1"

msdata:rowOrder="0">

<GuestName>Wendy McCormick</GuestName>

<CheckInTime>2003-07-

23T00:00:00.0000000+08:00</CheckInTime>

<CheckOutTime>2003-07-

24T00:00:00.0000000+08:00</CheckOutTime>

<Email>wendymcc@yahoo.com</Email>

<Address>15 OAK STREET, SURREY HILLS</Address>

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234

<RoomNumber>1</RoomNumber> <ModifiedTime>2003-

07-17T20:52:37.0000000+08:00</ModifiedTime>

<CreatedDate>2003-07-

17T20:51:50.4500000+08:00</CreatedDate>

<ReserveChannel>Group</ReserveChannel>

</rcReserveLog>

<rcReserveDetail diffgr:id="rcReserveDetail1"

msdata:rowOrder="0">

</rcReserveDetail>

</NewDataSet>

</diffgr:diffgram>

</DataSet>

5 EVALUATION OF GHIRS

Many 5-star hotel groups deployed this system. One

of the hotel groups includes three 5-star hotels and

seven 4-star hotels locate in different cities. Each

hotel has about from 200 to 300 standard rooms and

luxury rooms with other facilities such as restaurant,

bar, swimming pool, recreation room and so on.

Then we conducted an evaluation study focusing on

the staff performance of hotel reservation and

consumer experience. The first quarter after

deployment the group make ten percent more profit

than last year. We found that by using the system the

time staffs spent in front of their computers reduced

greatly. We observed 3 hotels in this group. The

following figure shows the staff of one hotel in front

office should spend about 2 minutes to finish a

reservation process from paper information and

almost 4 minutes from telephone information,

according the observation of 69 general front office

staffs in this hotel. If reservation is done by help of

GHIRS, only 30 seconds are needed for staffs to

confirm available room. If no confirmation needed,

the system just does everything automatically. So

our aim to reduce the human interaction with the

system receives positive result.

118

222

100

150

200

250

Se conds

Figure 3: Reservation processing time by different

methods

On the side of consumers, it also improves the

hotel reservation experience well. Although

nowadays computing technologies are still not

“disappear”, as described by Mark Weiser as “they

weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life

until they are indistinguishable from it” (Weiser,

1991). With GHIRS, people needn’t be stuck facing

his PC or make an expensive long distance phone

call to make a reservation. Instead, by only sending

cheap mobile short text messages to certain number,

it can be finished. Or he can browse his palm size

device and submit his request. Although integrating

wearable computing device such as IBM’s Linux

smart watch (Narayanaswami, 2002) outside the

laboratory and into our system still faces significant

challenges, our approach successfully offers various

ways to make a hotel reservation.

The system is compared with other two hotel

management systems. One is a US software

company’s product that dominates the largest market

part in China’s 5-star hotels. The other is also a

popular system shares second largest market part in

China’s 3 to 5-star hotels. We choose each system’s

latest version. Compared with these current

commercial hotel management systems, GHIRS has

lots of advantages. The most strength of GHIRS is

integration that seamlessly links different systems of

hotel chains.

WEB SERVICES IN HOTEL INDUSTRY

235

Table 1: Comparison with other systems

Features System 1 System 2 GHIRS

Database

Sybase SQL server Any database

Integrated

Reservation system

Yes No Yes

Integrated POS

system

Yes No Yes

Integrated credit

card authorization

and settlement

Yes Yes Yes

Integrated

Customer’s profile in

whole hotel group

No No Yes

Integrated Room

Locking system

Yes No Yes

Integrated

Enterprise

Information System

No No Yes

Integrated Hotel

Supply Chain

System

No No Yes

Integrated Mobile

Housekeep system

No No Yes

6 FUTRUE WORK OF WEB

SERVICES IN HOTEL

INDUSTRY

Web service technology is developed rapidly these

years as a practical means to integrate heterogeneous

systems and develop new applications. Our project

of GHIRS successfully integrates systems in hotel

business chains together. Although research has

greatly advanced in this area, developing and

maintaining integration system in hotel industry

remains a lot of challenges.

First, web services provide us great freedom to

exchange data and define data format, however, how

to define the data standard format still relies on

people who use it. Our experience implicated that in

order to deploy a global, or to less scale, national

wide hotel reservation system, there is a long road

ahead for hotel industry to get standardization.

Nowadays there are several hotel alliances existed,

but these organizations do not touch data exchange

standard between enterprises. So our work is limited

in the range of certain hotels deployed Foxhis

system previously. If some agreements on hotel

industry standards would be settled, business to

business (B2B) system and business to customer

(B2C) system in hotel industry would provide both

enterprises and consumers more benefits.

Second, web services technology is a quite high

level technology, thus its security features are

mainly dependent on the lower level technologies.

Web services security is one of the most important

and complicated challenges related our work. There

are lots of research papers on providing security

solution of integration of heterogeneous computers

and resources spread across multiple domains with

the intent to provide users services. Current

technologies such as firewalls, virtual private

networks (VPN) are used to protect communication

between user’s host and server. On web-based

application, Secure HTTP (HTTPS) implemented

over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is widely used as

well. XML-based security standards that are still

evolving propose a series of standards for

authentication, authorization, and public key

management, for example, Security Assertions

Markup Language (SAML), XML Key Management

Specification (XLMS), WS-License and WS-

Security by different organizations.

By all these means above we intend to obtain the

following basic targets. One is to keep the contents

confidentiality and integrity - that is to ensure

nobody ever tempers or steals the data transferred

through public networks. The other is to control

access to web services. Before use web services, end

users must pass the authorization procedure. Finally,

but not least importantly, protecting the server from

malicious attacks is practical and imperative

problem because there always no enough security

when services opened to the Internet. For example,

currently the DDoS attacks draw many attentions of

researchers to protect web applications from the

attacks (Xiang, 2004).

Third, beside the technical issues, there are also

social issues on security and privacy. The consumer

might don’t care a certain hotel or hotel group to

keep his personal profile. For example, he is an

acrophobe and always prefers the room on the

ground floor. If his personal information is open for

other organizations for instance, the travel agents, to

access through web services, it is possible for them

to abuse the information or be eavesdropped by

some criminals. Then the problem becomes very

serious. Some legislation still need be developed to

solve this problem.

7 CONCLUSION

From the project we discussed above, we can see

many key advantages of web services in hotel

industry.

1. Web Services technology supports increased

operational efficiencies and improved services by

allowing multiple applications to interoperate.

ICETE 2004 - GLOBAL COMMUNICATION INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND SERVICES

236

2. XML, the language of web services, is simple,

adaptable, extensible and supported by industry-

developed standards.

3. Web Services and XML messaging standards

help IT managers resolve technology decisions by

devolving application issues from infrastructure, and

the limits otherwise imposed by proprietary

protocols and features.

4. It increased hotel customers’ satisfaction;

meanwhile, it decreased the cost of customer

services and distribution process.

However, customers will never be satisfied by

just making a relative easy reservation by several of

substitutable devices. They push our project go

ahead with requirements of easy to use features.

Therefore, enterprises need an increasingly robust IT

infrastructure to handle the unpredictability and

rapid growth associated with e-business ventures

(Foster, 2002). Some smart and intelligent systems

with more integration would be developed. For

example, when people make a decision to travel

somewhere, the reservation system could provide the

optimized schedule for him, book the cheap flight,

reserve the table in his favourite restaurant and make

a room reservation according his preference of

hotels. All this work would be done automatically

with little human interaction. So we should develop

a generic web service system work with airline web

service processor, restaurant web service processor

and hotel web service processor. We have make

some attempt on integrate airline services into

GHIRS. Another integration application is to link

the wireless restaurant order system and this hotel

system together. Although now it makes some

progress in the integration development, there is still

much research and development work ahead.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research is supported by West Lake Software

Inc. The authors would like to thank Mingkui Yang

and Liang Gao for their valuable advices, and

Changjie Bian and other software engineers in

department of R&D 2, West Lake Software, for their

assiduous programming work.

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