Hotel Reservation Problem

Introduction

A hotel chain operating in Miami wishes to offer room reservation services over the internet. They have three hotels in Miami: Lakewood, Bridgewood and Ridgewood. Each hotel has separate weekday and weekend (Saturday and Sunday) rates. There are special rates for rewards customers as a part of loyalty program. Each hotel has a rating assigned to it.

• Lakewood: with a rating of 3 has weekday rates as $110 for regular customer and $80 for rewards customer. The weekend rates are $90 for regular customer and $80 for a rewards customer.
• Bridgewood: with a rating of 4 has weekday rates as $160 for regular customer and $110 for rewards customer. The weekend rates are $60 for regular customer and $50 for a rewards customer.
• Ridgewood: with a rating of 5 has weekday rates as $220 for regular customer and $100 for rewards customer. The weekend rates are $150 for regular customer and $40 for a rewards customer.

Write a program to help an online customer find the cheapest hotel.

The input to the program will be a range of dates for a regular or rewards customer. The output should be the cheapest available hotel. In case of a tie, the hotel with highest rating should be returned.

Notes

• There must be a way to supply the application with the input data via text file.
• The application must run.
• You should provide sufficient evidence that your solution is complete by, as a minimum, indicating that it works correctly against the supplied test data.

IO formats

Input: <customer_type>: <date1>, <date2>, <date3>, ...

Output: <name_of_the_cheapest_hotel>

Examples and test data

Input 1: Regular: 16Mar2009(mon), 17Mar2009(tues), 18Mar2009(wed)

Output 1: Lakewood

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Input 2: Regular: 20Mar2009(fri), 21Mar2009(sat), 22Mar2009(sun)

Output 2: Bridgewood

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Input 3: Rewards: 26Mar2009(thur), 27Mar2009(fri), 28Mar2009(sat)

Output 3: Ridgewood

Solution

Implementation

Programming language: C#

Runtime environment: .NET Core v2.1

Structure

Solution organized in three projects: HotelService, HotelReservationCLI and Tests.

1. HotelService: Actual core logic of the solution.

   Contains the following classes: Client, Rate, Hotel, HotelInvoice and HotelDirectory.

   Client class: It stores (only) the type of a customer (either Regular or Rewards).

   Rate class: It holds the corresponding rates for both Regular and Rewards customers. It is responsible for returning the correct rate according to a customer.

   Hotel class: It contains the name, rating, weekday rates and weekend rates related to a hotel. These last two members are instances of the Rate class. The current class computes the price for a reservation given a customer and a collection of dates, being aware of both the type of customer and whether the dates are weekdays or weekends. The result can be found inside an object of the HotelInvoice class.

   HotelInvoice class: It associates a customer with its reservation dates and hotel, as well as the computed price (returned by the Hotel class).

   HotelDirectory class: It bunches up Hotel objects. The current class finds the cheapest hotel by requesting each hotel's reservation price and sorting them. If two or more hotels return the same price, the hotel with the highest rating has priority.

2. HotelReservationCLI: Console project that consumes HotelService.

3. Tests: NUnit test project for both HotelService and HotelReservationCLI.

Execution

The .NET Core environment is required. Instructions on how to set it up can be found in https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download.

Open a terminal window inside the HotelReservationCLI directory and type:

dotnet run <Hotel_directory_file_path> <Reservation_data_file_path>

where:

• <Hotel_directory_file_path> is the path of a file that contains the hotels' data. A sample of such file is MiamiHotels.txt (located inside the HotelReservationCLI directory).
• <Reservation_data_file_path> is the path of a file that contains the customer's reservation data. A sample of such file is ReservationInput.txt (located inside the HotelReservationCLI directory).

Therefore, the instruction to run the code with the provided files is:

dotnet run MiamiHotels.txt ReservationInput.txt

For every reservation registry found in the <Reservation_data_file_path> file, the program will output the corresponding cheapest hotel.

Details of each required file can be found inside the mentioned samples.

There are no restrictions about Operating Systems. The code runs wherever .NET Core does.

Results

Input:

Regular: 16Mar2009(mon), 17Mar2009(tues), 18Mar2009(wed)
regular: 20Mar2009(fri), 21Mar2009(sat), 22Mar2009(sun)
Rewards: 26Mar2009(thur), 27Mar2009(fri), 28Mar2009(sat)

Output:

Lakewood
Bridgewood
Ridgewood