Databases In Hotels

As we have learned a database is "a collection of information organized to provide efficient retrieval". This can obviously be applied to many businesses in any field. A bank must keep a database of money in accounts and a store maintains a database of all the items it has in stock. Databases can be more though. Google keeps a database of images and Netflix has it's database of videos. [1] One database system that interests me is how a hotel can keep track of all of the rooms it has available and keeping track of various prices of different rooms. Through some research, Microsoft Access, a popular database program, seems to have all the tools a manager would need to fully operate a small or large scale hotel. [2] With the help of this powerful program a user could keep track of all the rooms in the building and their status, number of beds, and pricing along with other information like employees and their pay roll. [3] This all inclusive software can also be used to create reports to give to marketing teams to try to increase sales and profitability. There are even full time jobs for maintaining databases. Here is one i found online that lists responsibilities like: Supporting and monitoring the Hotel Partner Hotline 800 number and addresses hotelier concerns. Coaching and educating hotels on operational policies and procedures. Ensuring that each new hotel is functioning properly and has a comprehensive understanding of the Priceline program prior to activation by test booking all new hotels. Databases are really a massive field that one could study and take a full time job in. [4] 1. What specific challenges does your database system implementation have? One problem I could see is the issue of connecting several hotels together as we see in chains like Hilton or Marriott. Single hotels could manage their own data but if company executives wanted to have access to all the data from all the hotels, there could be a problem. A solution would be to implement cloud computing and linking all of the data together or storing it in a central data center for the company. 2. In what ways does it provide competitive advantage for the organization using it? A computerized database grants a huge advantage in speed vs a company keeping track of rooms manually. Also, computers can implement tactics like data mining to find trends in the staying habits of customers to try and make them book more frequently. 3. What improvements would you suggest? One interesting improvement could be giving customers access online to some parts of the database to make reservations. This could eliminate the need to store the availability of rooms twice, once in the database and once online. If this is done, hotels could probably save money on storage or use the same storage to store some other sort of data. [1] http://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit04/primer04_01.phtml [2] http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/access-2010-database-software-features-and-benefits-HA101809011.aspx [3] http://www.functionx.com/access/applications/ceilinn.htm [4] http://www.fairfieldcountyjobs.com/job/13920871/hotel-database-analyst/