I am making a website on a city. I have a list of all the hotels there but I dont know how to make a system where user selects different options while choosing a hotel to stay. For example: Days to stay in hotel Category of hotel Affordable charges (30 euros, 40 euros etc) No of adults etc Does anybody any knowledge how to make it? Secondly, is there any software which could help me in this case. Kindly let me know thanks
Hello, you can try phpmyrealty.com script, seems like you will just have to rename some fields to make it work for you.. Most of the required functionality is included..
Ya its looking good but its costly... Is there any other such kinda systems which is available for free... Thanks
Not sure what you are really trying to achieve here? Are you simply wanting to show a list of hotels or actually check availability? How are you intending to get the data to populate the tables as you are not realistically going to get someone from Hilton/ Starwood/ Best Western etc spending time and effort manually adding and updating data to a small site.
You are looking for an expensive application. Are you using a feed from an affiliate? I have done a lot of work in this area. Q...
OK now let me explain. My website is for visitors who come to my city and want to look for hotels. I want such a program in my site where user gives the following information Arrival date No of days to stay No of persons to live 1 bed, 2 bed or .... Price ... <50 <100 euros etc Actually I have plans to affiliate with the hotels in my area so that if the customer goes to any of the hotels then I get the commission or like that. That's what I want to design in a way that my script shows the list of hotels according to preferences and then when user selects a particular hotel then automatically I should get a specific percentage. I hope this later part wil be done through the affiliate program from hotel administration. But for the hotel search on the basis of preferences given by the user is my task..... Let me know if you still have Questions. As an example you can look at hamburg-tourism.de/en where on the right hand side you can see the section "Search and Booking" I want such kind of program Thanks
Any small site is almost certainly going to be using an API if there is a "date" or "price" element to it as you simply arent going to get large chains taking the time to upload their availability etc. If you simply have an indicitive price and note the dates element then you could potentially get away with it but still some wont want indivitive prices showing as they may lose business when their prices are much lower than normal (special offers, low season etc). Even your reference site suggests it is using APIs due to the wait screen.
I have no idea about API. However, you are quite right that not everyone will be interested in showing the prices. I think a good alternative is if I start jotting down the names of all the hotels, their ranking, their location. But do you think this info will be useful for those who are interested in rserving a room online? I think a good idea is that first I give an intro about the hotel and then I give a direct link to reach its booking section which will be exactly that hotel's official room reservation form. However, I am not sure if it can help me in dealing with the hotels that if a user comes to tht page through my web then I should get a commission. Do you have any good suggestion about it? Is it me who will make an affiliate program or is every hotel has such a program? Finally, even if I use the above mentioned method then still I need to have such kind of interface where the user selects the location, hotel ranking, etc and gets the result..... How to design that thing? I guess there are some scripts available and should be avaialble for free as well but I am not sure what name wud be for such kind of php scripts. Any suggestions please?
The norm would be that the hotel itself has the affiliate scheme that you connect into. If they dont they may be willing to create something but to be honest it is fairly unlikely. If you honestly believe the site will be successful it may be worth creating it with hotels where there isnt an affiliate scheme too for completeness and once you can demonstrate that you are sending a reasonable volume of traffic "threaten" to remove them unless an arrangement can be agreed - a number of the insurance price comparison sites did this in the UK and whilst a few did decline a large number didnt. On the price thing you can always do a small number of tiers instead of actual prices (eg Luxury, Average, Budget or $$$, $$, $) - without truly defining what each means you make it easier for maintaining it. As to off the shelf scripts, wouldnt have an idea what to search for as we build custom scripts (and in .Net) but dont have the "hotel" bit in it as it is irrelevant as the same script could be used for restaurants, retailers, clubs, real estate etc
Well I live in the same city for which I am making the website. I am sure, I can attract the visitors to my city if not all then atleast a handsome amount of them. There are a few places quite popular in my city e.g. a port where millions of people come each year and there are a lot of boat riding companies working with which I can affiliate as well. But the only problem is I am new to this stuff but have the idea to go in which direction which can attract users and companies. e.g. from overture i have come to know users are more interested in hotels and cheap air tickets for my city. Most probably they are those visitors who wud be coming to visit the city to see the famous places in my city. Therefore, it is a good idea to give a good info on hotels. Now the problem is there are more than 1500 hotels in my city and it is not a good idea to simply place their names alphabetically and to give their information on clicking. I think user would like to search by filtering e.g. location of hotel , price range etc. That's why i wanna build a user friendly interface otherwise its not important to make such kind of interface. Even at the moment i m not interested in focusing on affiliate program as i know its not a good idea to ask them unless you get popular. But I really feel I can make it possible. I am planning to consolidate loads of pics and video clips. Hope this will help. May be this type of interface is really difficult to mke but I can see it any web e.g. even a search option in any web is like this where user puts a word and the search engine looks through the database and replies with the matching query.... isnot it ?
A simple db query is by its very definition fairly simple to do. It becomes more difficult if you want to rank by "match level" etc but simple rank by alphabet, price is no problems. At the end of the day, if you think the idea has legs then is it not worth investing in a developer to create the engine at least if you are comfortable at designing the front end? It wouldnt be a job for us on the basis you want to use PHP which we wouldnt touch with a barge pole and your idea of doing it yourself suggests you would be on a tight budget but there are plenty of developers here that are in this space.
ofcourse its not a bad idea but first i wanna check if i m able to do it without any expenditure secondly the web is in initialt stage i m trying to gather all the resources. Most probably i will have to spend if i dont ge tthis stuff from any already made script.... what abt real state scripts or php directory scripts............ are not these same as i want
Having never used an off the shelf script in over 10 years of creating websites I cannot say the best way of finding a suitable script but as per my own previous post, things like that potentially would be suitable. A budget developer is most likely to use an off the shelf script but saying that, it is only the adding/ removing/ amending listings that is going to add any kind of work to the job - the basic db design/ search/ listing is very simple
I have gone through a few other webs on hotels and i am wondering to see that they are not only displaying the list of hotels on user preferences but also have a reservation system for the rooms and the interesting thing is that reservation doesnot look like to be the official reservation of that particular hotel. Howcome they can charge by themselves? secondly, how come they check the availability of the rooms? are these integrated with those hotels official reservation system?
They are using an API to handle them (as I said right at the start) or are actual travel agents. An example API is http://api.superbreak.com/help/index.cfm?e=displayPage&page=app_booking
I see but i think even if you make this thing then still you have to be very active.. suppose if the room is not available and ur system says its available and reserve it for the user then who will be responsible?
Thats where you need to check the terms and conditions of the API that you are using and ensure that your own terms and conditions are very well written... ultimately you cannot get out of liability through T&Cs however you can mitigate things well and make it more difficult for people to claim against you.
what about directing people to the hotel's official reservation page? However, i donot see this thing in most webs as they have their own reservation systems
The problem would be that... 1) its a bit naff to search on your site and show all the exact details but then they have to go search again on Hilton.com etc 2) Many hotels have different pricing systems so if you used an API from SuperBreak to get the pricing and availability but then passed the person directly over to the hotel to make the booking the price they then see may well be different to what you offered them 3) without taking bookings on your site you are at their mercy to be honest on how many they convert to sales
your points seem to be valid... What are your charges if I request you to design such a system for me.... I am not interested in doing it right now but in future ofcourse I will be needing it. Lemme know tnx. one more thing .... i have a low budget so please keep this thing in mind as well.