Dairy-Air is a small airline with routes between Calgary and other Canadian cities. We provide economic transportation for our customers by using our fleet of 10 planes, which may expand in the near future.
Simplicity is the key to the business and extravagent things like meals, or different classes of seating, are not offered. (However, we do allow preferences for aisle, center, and window seats, although these are only preferences.) We also do not deal with booking of connecting flights (since all flights are only to or from Calgary and another city). A policy of 15% overbooking is used. Any customer who is inconvenienced by this policy is compensated with 50% of the fare and is booked on the next avaliable flight. If a person is futher inconvenienced then the fare is reduced to 25% of the original price and so on.
In order to maintain our competitive edge in the industry we wish to transfer our current paper based reservation system to a more effecient computer based one. The following is a minimum requirement as to the system required.
A quick overview of how current system works is in order. Basically, there are three steps in the reservation system:
The system must be a intuitive system that can be learned with little or no training. The system must also allow quick and simple access to data. A GUI is ideal, but we welcome other, possibly better interfaces.
The system should also try and minimize the possibility of user error by doing frequent checks on user data to ensure its validity. ie. It shouldn't allow the booking of a flight that is already over capacity.
The general reliability is very important so the possibility of failure must be minimized and in the event of a failure the recovery must be done swiftly. A method of backup and low maintenance of the system are musts.
The system must disallow access to parts of the system by staff who do not have the necessary security clearance. It must also allow easy, and secure, management of the security settings.
When customer contacts the airline looking for a flight we check for available flights using an online flight-list for available space. This list should be searchable based on the departure and arrival dates and destination.
From there, the user (employee) should simply be able to pick the flight the customer is interested in and add that customer to the reservation list (this should only be allowed if we are not overbooked by more than 15%).
The booking of a flight requires the reservation form be completed. Attributes to be on the reservation form:
If Cancellation is made the database must be searchable so that a specific reservation can be located, checked to ensure it is the right one ie. bring up full res. form, and deleted. Search may be done by one or more of the major fields outlined in the Booking section.
Editing a Reservation's much like deleting except it allows changes.
At this time customers are assigned a specific seat. Those that do not get a seat (due to overbooking) are compensated and re-booked on the next avaliable flight. A Passenger list (only the people on the plane) is generated.
Reporting may be done on the screen, but provision must also be made to allow hardcopies.
Flights should be able to be:
The data needed to be stored for flight scheduling should include:
The functions for the airplane information are:
The data needed to be stored for airplanes are:
The security features are needed to allow only qualified and trusted staff access to the various sub-systems. Each staff member should be required to log into the system. Login should require a user name and a password. Security information should be stored for each staff member. This information must include whether the staff member has the ability to read the data in each of the sub-systems, and whether the staff member can make changes to the data in each of the sub-systems.
Some sort of security database should be maintained. It should have the following features:
