HOW OPEN DOOR WORKS

Open Door is a bed management system for small and medium hostels. It is designed for you to manage your reservations and bed allocations easily, quickly and securely. It operates entirely on your own computer.

Open Door uses MySQL as its database engine. MySQL is available for free download, and you install this on your computer before installing Open Door.

Open Door has 3 frames: The Bednight Frame, the Reservation Frame and the Guest Frame (see screenshots).

The Bednight Frame is a grid with beds downwards and dates across. This frame is always visible. If you have more than about 30 beds, you can scroll the frame to see the lower ones. Normally 8 dates show at a time, starting with today. You can change the start date to be any date from Yesterday to the latest date stored. Reserved beds are indicated by the reservation number, and blank cells represent vacancies. You can also display the name of the reservation next to the number.

When you receive an enquiry, you can optionally examine the bednight frame for vacancies, and temporarily reserve some. Then you click New Reservation, and the Reservation Frame appears. Here you enter the reservation name, number of guests, number of nights, first night and other information, with space for comments. After saving this, it takes you to the bednight frame at the correct date for you to allocate beds (or confirm the temporary ones). The reservation frame provides checks on whether enough beds have been allocated.

Then you can call up the Guest Frame and fill in the guest's personal details, whichever you wish: First name, email, telephone, address etc.

If you need to retrieve a reservation to examine it, just click on Retrieve Reservation. You then choose the required reservation from a list, and display it in the reservation frame. If changes need to be made, you may change appropriate items. If you change the number of guests, number of nights or the starting date, these will need changes in the bednight allocations, so the buttons guide you to the Bednight Frame where you make manual changes to the bed reservations. On return to the Reservation Frame, it tells you if the wrong number of bednights have been reserved and whether you have allocated the correct first night.

Open Door can output any of its data in any standard format. For example, you can make a printout of tonight's bookings to put on your notice board. Or you can output financial data for the last month in 'comma-separated' format to input to your financial package or spreadsheet. You can produce a tabulation of future vacancies to help with your allocations of beds to booking engines. And data can be output in XML format for the purpose of interacting with any package that can read this interchange format. Every hostel is likely to have different needs, and we can set up these outputs for your particular needs at little or no cost.

• The Design of Open Door
• Prices

Does this look like the ideal system for you?

If so, please send an email to Peter Wright at the following address:
opendoor (AT) uktrail.com . (Replace AT by @)