Hotel booking process design & usability
Travel UCD – February 2003
To
cope with this issue, some hotel reservation websites ask for children's ages. They then
calculate the appropriate hotel, room or rate for that reservation.
Those websites that don’t allow the input of numbers of children should
make it clear to users
that children are always counted as adults.
Can a reservation be made for a child staying in a room alone or to share with another
child?
In some hotels,
for safety, legal and therefore insurance reasons, children are not permitted to
stay in a room unless accompanied by an adult. Although this regulation is known within the
hotel
and travel industry, it is not generally understood in the wider population.
So, for example, a family of four (a couple with two 15-year-old children), that wishes to reserve
two rooms (a double
room for the couple, a twin room for the children) would have to make the
reservation so that each room contained one adult and one child. When the family arrive at the
hotel, they would probably arrange the rooms to fit their original intentions –
two adults in the
double room and the two children in the twin room.
Whether the regulation is enforced depends upon the hotel. It creates a particular problem for
hotel reservation websites that handle different hotels in different countries. Some will apply the
regulation, some not.
No rates loaded for children only
From a hotel perspective, hotels do not load rates for children only in hotels where children
cannot stay by themselves.
In addition, children typically stay free so having a child in a room by
themselves would mean that the hotel would need to give the room away for free.
Therefore, if a booking engine were to query for a rate for 0 adults and X children, none would
be returned.
A key purpose of the user interface is that the user shouldn’t need to know
these technical details
about rate loading. The user interface should guide the user to add a child to a reservation in the
most appropriate way.
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