Reading Week Madness Booking System This case study is about a travel agency that specializes in booking spring break/reading week vacations for college/university students. The narrative deals with real time bookings, financial transactions, and confirmations to ensure that students are correctly booked for the resort, week, room, and groupings as reserved and paid for. The system is manual. RWM wants to fully automate their system both, frontend dealing with the students and backend with the resorts. Papers, notifications, etc. have been lost or misplaced in the past and this has caused problems. This narrative deals with real business processes which require detailed financial information which must be made on an accurate and timely basis. Business Summary Reading Week Madness Ltd. (RWM) is a travel service that specializes in vacations for college/university students during reading week/spring break at various Caribbean resorts. It deals with about 230 campuses across the country. Each college/university campus has a campus representative who interacts with the students at the campus. RWM has a general manager, Steve Berry, who deals with all the campus representatives. Each resort has a campus coordinator who deals with the RWM manager and the students once they arrive at the resort. During the fall semester, approximately 30 resorts submit availability information to RWM indicating specific weeks, rooms, room capacities and rates for each week of the spring break. Note that spring break weeks differ across colleges and universities, mainly over the months of February and March. Each resort offers bookings for various weeks. The rates for the weeks and rooms differ depending on the week chosen. Usually, the resorts make available a variety of rooms with different capacities so students can book a room as a group. Rooms available are doubles for two, and group rooms for four. There are no other room capacities. Overbooking of rooms is not allowed. RWM generates a list of resorts, available weeks, available rooms, and room rates that are distributed to the campus representatives all over the country. RWM creates this list based on the email conversations they have with each individual resort during the months of October and November. This can be a lengthy process and often requires multiple iterations to get the availability details right and documented. This can take anywhere from 15 to 20 hours a week to complete over a 6-7 week period. This does not include the time to make modifications. The campus reps are paid $50/hour. Each campus has one rep. Students book their vacation by contacting the campus rep and providing details such as resort name, room type, student details together with names of students in their group for groups of 2 or 4. A deposit cheque is required during this booking. It is cashed and payment noted onthe student registration. Cashed cheques are totaled by campus and cross-referenced to each student and kept in a separate bank account. This activity can take about 15 hours a week over an 8-week period. These RWM activities occur in December and January in preparation for the reading weeks scheduled for the winter. Each college/university has a different cut-off date by which all bookings must be paid in full by means of a cheque for the total amount less the deposit. Once these cheques clear, they are organized by resort name and group names by the RWM manager. The amount totals are transferred by means of a banking transaction to the respective resorts. A 15% holdback is given to RWM Ltd. as payment for their services. The booking details are printed and faxed to each resort. Once each cheque clears, a confirmation of travel is created by the RWM manager and faxed to each campus rep who it turns distributes it to the students. When a group of students submits a reservation request for a particular week at a particular resort, RWM rep assigns the students to a room, ensuring sufficient capacity and the campus rep gives each student a reservation notification. If a student has not fully paid for the trip by the cut-off date that student is removed from the room list; a non-payment notice is created by RWM manager and it and the deposit is returned to the student by the rep. Students on the waiting list are asked if they would like to occupy the available spot. Modifications such as these require extra time to process, adding another 5 to 7 hours of work each week to the campus rep. If a student agrees to occupy the spot, that student must be accepted by the remaining students who are part of that group. The rep must notify each member of the group of the new student and ask if they accept that student. If all agree, the student is accepted, that new student is added to the group/room and a new added notice is given to each member of the group. If they do not agree that student can ask to join a different group that has fewer than 4 students. So, the process repeats itself. Most of the time, it resolves itself. However, if a 4- person room is finalized to have only 3 students in it, those 3 members must pay a higher rate to compensate for the rate loss of the missing student. When the cut-off date for a week arrives, RWM emails each resort a confirmed paper list of students booked by room for the week in question. RWM also transfers the funds to the resort. If a student does not arrive at the resort, they forsake all funds paid. No monies are returned at this point