DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPUTERIZED BOOKING SYSTEM OF A TRAVEL AGENCY (A CASE STUDY OF ABC LIMITED, )

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

COMPUTERIZED BOOKING SYSTEM OF A TRAVEL AGENCY is used to track all information pertaining to Travel booking management. A travel agency is a retail business, that sells travel related products and services to customers, on behalf of suppliers, such as airlines, car rentals, cruise lines, hotels, railways, sightseeing tours and package holidays that combine several products. In addition to dealing with ordinary tourists, most travel agencies have a separate department devoted to making travel arrangements for business travelers and some travel agencies specialize in commercial and business travel only. There are also travel agencies that serve as general sales agents for foreign travel companies, allowing them to have offices in countries other than where their headquarters are located.

The British company, Cox & Kings,is sometimes said to be the oldest travel agency in the world, but this rests upon the services that the original bank, established in 1758, supplied to its wealthy clients. The modern travel agency first appeared in the second half of the 19th century. Thomas Cook, in addition to developing the package tour, established a chain of agencies in the last quarter of the 19th century, in association with the Midland Railway. They not only sold their own tours to the public, but in addition, represented other tour companies. Other British pioneer travel agencies were Dean and Dawson, the Polytechnic Touring Association and the Co-operative Wholesale Society. The oldest travel agency in North America is Brownell Travel; on July 4, 1887, Walter T. Brownell led ten travelers on a European tour, setting sail from New York on the SS Devonia.

Travel agencies became more commonplace with the development of commercial aviation, starting in the 1920s. Originally, travel agencies largely catered to middle and upper class customers, but the post-war boom in mass-market package holidays resulted in travel agencies on the main streets of most British towns, catering to a working class clientèle, looking for a convenient way to book overseas beach holidays.

A major development in long-distance Travel booking management since the 1950s has been the use of intermodal transportation carriers. Intermodal transportation is the combination of two or more transportation modes used to move travel booking from origin to destination. Intermodal transportation improves the transfer of travel booking from intercity movement to local distribution. An example of this is the combined use of trucks and trains to move cargo over longer distances. Truck trailers are loaded with goods, driven to a rail yard, and transferred to a rail flatcar. They are then moved a long distance by train, unloaded at the destination rail yard, and driven to a market or a supply warehouse. Such a travel booking trip is called trailer-on-flatcar (TOFC) or container-on-flatcar (COFC). Today almost 20 percent of all truck trailer loads traveling over 800 km (500 mi) in the United States are transported this way.

Intermodal transportation requires cooperation and agreements relating to prices and delivery arrangements among the different carriers. Similar agreements apply in the transportation of international travel booking. One way that travellers use technology to exchange information is by using electronic tracking devices and software. These tools allow travellers to monitor the progress of travel booking movement. Automatic equipment identification tags similar to bar codes are placed on containers and truck trailers for identification as they go through different stages of their trip.

• STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The management of Travel booking in Nigeria has over the years attracted poor patronage as a result of errors inherent in the system.  It is no longer a new thing that loss of customers’ goods is now the order of the day, the reasons are not far-fetched.  Due to this manual procedure involved in Travel booking management, clients have no other option than to be at the mercy of these error prone procedures.

Members of staff of ABC LIMITED one to the registered travelling agencies and a subsidiary of  plc cannot provide their goods that is the nature of the method used in calculating the tonnage to know the amount of money to pay as travel booking fees.

The method of information storage in the company is poor.  This limits the number of official documents accessible by the customers because the system is not capable of managing old items of information which could be of use to be customer of anytime.

There is little or no security control system where the customers’ goods, document and classified information of the customer could be safe guarded from unauthorized access.

SIGNIFICANT OF STUDY

To provide efficient, effective and timely travel service nationally and internationally.

Our main objective is to provide efficient, effective, timely service to all our customers. This is done by assisting our customers in planning their trip and obtaining best value.

Periodically we introduce innovative services and products than currently exist in the Nigerian travel market and develop a good approach to serving our customers.