UrlyBird: Show records outside of 48 hour range

[Daniel. Pike]

Hi All,

I was just wondering if I could ask for some advice on the 48 hour rule for the UrlyBird assignment. Basically, I have interpreted the instructions to say that a user should only be allowed to book a hotel 48 hours prior to the availability date (and have also allowed them to book on the same day for the last minute bookings).

My question is, however, should records which are not within the 48 hour range be displayed at all? If they can't be booked, does it make any sense in displaying them?

Thanks!

Daniel.

[Eiji Seki]

I won't show them. What's the point of doing so if they will be of no use?
They will just polute the information window making it more difficult for the user to locate the info he needs.

[Aruneesh Salhotra]

Interesting. I am showing all the records right now. But I think at the time of the booking, one should show information to that respect that one could only book after a while. It gives a heads up to the CSR that there might be a room after say 6 hrs.

However I have a question, what is the 48 period starting from. Do we take local time or take today date + 2 days. Since the hotel availability is only date, there is no time information.

[Jonathan Moore]

I did show all records, though I displayed bookable records in black text and unbookable (i.e. already booked or not within 48 hours) in red. I also had a check box that allowed the user to decide whether they wanted to see all results or bookable only. My reasoning was that a user may want to see why a particular room isn't available for booking, or who it is booked to.

I took the 48 hour rule to be up to 48 hours before the start of the day the room is available for (i.e. midnight or just after(. So if the room is for March 4th, it should be bookable any time on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th. Not strictly 48 hours, but I think you just need to make a judgement call and justify it in your choices document.

[Dan Burke]

My approach was basically the same as Jonathans. The only difference being my gui has a switch [defaults to true] that the user can select to enable or disable the 48 hour rule.

Its a safegaurd that may or may not be neccessary.