Travel Agent Booking Software

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From: Smylers
Subject: Travel Agent Booking Software
Date: 17:13 on 16 Apr 2005
This is a vicarious hate: I haven't touched the softare myself, but just
sat behind a travel agent employee trying to use it.  I didn't take it
as a good sign when her first action was to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring
up the Windows 95 'Close Program' list and use it to quit the program
she'd been using with the previous customer.

I also wasn't impressed that when listing possible holidays all the
available actions are listed with 2-digit codes, but require pressing
Enter after them anyway -- so simply paging through the list involves
typing 5 0 Enter 5 0 Enter 5 0 Enter ...

But my main complaint is with the lack of control the user has when
searching.  I was initially told that our requirements were so flexible
they gave lots of possibilities -- mainly cos they didn't include a
destination, nor a price.  That ought to make it easy to come up with
something acceptable, but apparently not.

Many of the criteria we did have the system had no way of using for
narrowing down the search results.  Now for some things, such as "not
overrun with rampaging mobs of British lager louts", that's
understandable.  

But for easily categorized multiple-choice criteria such as the number
of stars on the hotel and how many meals we want included not being able
to search by them makes no sense at all -- they are clearly fields in
the database, since they appear as separate columns in the output, but
the only way to use them is to page through the results (5 0 Enter,
remember) scanning that column by eye and ignoring the ones we don't
want!

The travel agent person mentions again that because so many holidays
meet our requirements it's quite hard to choose.  So I try to help out
by adding in some criteria which aren't essential, but nice to have: in
particular, I say to restrict the airports to London (rather than London
or Leeds) and the date to ending on the day of the London.pm June social
meeting (rather than being any 7 days within a 12-day window) -- since
we're in a position to be picky, let's take advantage of a trip I'm
making to London anyway and avoid me having to make a separate trip (or
my friend having to make a trip from London to Leeds).

But that only seems to make things worse, because for the destinations
the travel agent person has chosen to look at there aren't any flights meeting
those additional criteria -- not that that's particularly easy to
determine, because the software presumes a tolerance on the flight dates
so we have flights on dates we don't want mixed in with those on the
right dates, because the output isn't even in chronological order!  So
it lists holidays that have the wrong flights, the wrong accommodation,
or both -- and we have to wade through it manually just to determine
that it's done this.

I say "destinations the travel agent person has chosen to look at"
because that's what the software insists on: performing searches for
holidays at a named place.  So she has to guess places that might be
appropriate for us and try out our criteria -- which are now _too_
constraining for any particular destination!  Apparently it doesn't
matter how restrictive our constraints are -- if we don't know where we
want to go, then the software won't let us at the information it's
hiding in the database.

Hmmm, maybe if there's a holiday website out there with an SQL injection
bug in it's code then I could exploit it to inject some SQL that
searches for a holiday that meets our criteria -- that'd certainly be
more user-friendly than the system in the local travel agent ...

Smylers
-- 
May God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a
difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done.

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