The pandemic has put a lot of stress on the travel industry but things are finally starting to look up. Recovery takes time and goes in phases, but the future is bright. According to this article, luxury travel is the fastest growing sector of the travel industry. It’s expected to grow 7.4 percent between 2019 and 2025, reaching $354.7 billion by 2026.
If you’re planning on opening or re-establishing a travel business, having a travel website database is helpful. You can put this database on your website so that people can sign up for your travel services. Below are some tips for designing a database for your travel website.
Determine Your Goal
As database experts, we feel it’s important to jot down a few sentences about what you want your database to accomplish. This way, you can ensure your database meets your goals.
Brainstorm Your Options
Once you know what your goal is, you can start brainstorming your options. Think about what information you want to include on your travel website. Most websites of this sort include vacations, cruises, hotels, tickets and reservations. All of these words are entities and can become part of your database if you choose to use them.
Identify Relationships
The next step is to identify relationships between entities. An identifying relationship is a relationship between two entities – a parent and child. The child entity cannot exist without the parent entity. In this case, a neighborhood would be a ‘child’ of a city, and a city is a ‘child’ of a state.
Determine Your Entities
To create a rough sketch of your database, start by drawing boxes on a piece of paper. Write one major entity at the top of each box. For instance, Destination can be a major entity because it serves as a parent to entities like beaches, resorts and islands.
Review Your Information
Once you have your boxes filled out, move things around and review your final boxes. This is the foundation for your travel database. The boxes become your tables and the entities in those tables become columns.
Identify the Primary Keys
Now it’s time to identify the table’s primary keys, which is an entity that describes each record in the table. Usually, this is the major entity that appears at the top of your table. When specifying primary keys, choose entities that won’t change. If you can’t come up with anything, use an arbitrary number instead.
Handle One-to-Many Relationships
One-to-many relationships are the backbone of a relational database. For example, a Client table and Vacation table have a one-to-many relationship because one client can take many vacations. The client becomes the ‘one’ table and vacations become the ‘many’ table.
Start Building Your Travel Database Today
With everything in place, you can use a database management system to create a database for your travel website. If you need help building a travel database, contact Arkware today. We can help you design and implement a travel database for your website that allows people to book vacations like cruises and all-inclusive tours.