Computer Engineering and Intelligent Systems www.iiste.org ISSN 2222-1719 (Paper) ISSN 2222-2863 (Online) Vol.5, No.12, 2014 9 Development of an Online Bus Ticket Reservation System for a Transportation Service in Nigeria Oloyede, M.O. 1 *, Alaya S.M. 2 Adewole, K.S 3 1.Department of Computer Engineering, University of Pretoria, Private Bag X20 Hatfield 0028 SA 2.Department of Information and Communication Science, University of Ilorin 3.Department of Computer Science, University of Ilorin *Email of Corresponding author: tahir.oloyede@gmail.com Abstract The use of bus traveling is a large growing business in Nigeria and other countries; the manual use of bus reservation is presently very strenuous and also consumes a lot of time by having to stay on a long queue. For this reason, an efficient system is to be proposed in this paper to ease the issue of bus reservation amongst indigenes within the country. The system is a web – based application that allows visitors to check bus availability, buy and pay bus ticket online. In this paper, the proposed bus reservation system was developed using Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML), PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), Structure Query Language (SQL), Ajax, Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), and JavaScript. Keywords: Bus Reservation, Queue, Efficient 1. Introduction The Online Bus Ticket Reservation System is a web-based application that allows visitors check bus ticket availability, buy bus ticket and pay the bus ticket online (Asaad, Ayad and Hayder, 2012). This system is established for all the home/office users after gaining access from the administrator. According to Invaderzim (2011), Online Bus Reservation System provides bus transportation system, a facility to reserved seats, cancellation of seats and different types of enquiry which need an instant and quick reservation. This system can be used by the users in performing online reservation via internet for their all business purposes. Users can use this program directly on their websites and no need to install it. The use of bus traveling is a large growing business in Nigeria and other countries; hence bus reservation system deals with maintenance of records of each passenger who had reserved a seat for a journey. It also includes maintenance of information like schedule and details of each bus (Shivaji, 2010). Also, we get to know that there are many operations, which they have to do manually. It takes a lot of time and causes many errors. Due to this, sometimes a lot of problems occur and they were facing many disputes with customers. To solve the above problem, and further maintaining records of items, seat availability for customers, price of per seat, bill generation and other things, we are offering this proposal of reservation system. The reservation system has three modules. First module helps the customer to enquire the availability of seats in a particular bus at particular date, the second module helps him to reserve a ticket and with the third module he can cancel a reserved ticket. However, since the current reservation system is still conducted manually and separately at each branch, contact must be made by each branch’s front-officer to the head office for each customer’s enquiry in order to get the latest update on schedule, seat availability and other reservation-related information; as well as to avoid duplicate bookings or over-capacity. There is also a physical limit to the reservation availability as each branch only operates during certain hours and reservations can only be made on-the-spot. These limitations are not the only issues the company is currently facing. Other factors that create problems include human errors (e.g. miscalculations in ticket price, mistakes in noting passenger data, etc.), the fluctuation of passengers during certain periods of time that causes a bottleneck in the check-in process because of the inability of the front- officer to multitask and the lack of overview or report of the on-going business; making it difficult for the company to judge past/current performance or plan future improvements. Looking at these problems and limitations, it is clear that both the company and the customers require an integrated reservation system that is more efficient in information update and reservation handling and also easy to use. Electronic tickets, or e-tickets, give evidence that their holders have permission to enter a place of entertainment, use a means of transportation, or have access to some internet services. Bus Ticket Reservation System enables the customer to buy bus ticket, make payment, and ask for information online easily. Furthermore, staff can sell bus ticket using Bus Ticket Reservation System after check bus ticket availability for the customer and print the bus ticket to the customer that queue up in the counter. The method to solve this problem is to create an online buying bus ticket system. Customer can buy the bus ticket over the Internet, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and the bus ticket can't be lost, stolen or left behind. In addition, the online system lets the customers check the availability of the bus ticket before they buy bus ticket (Wee, 2007). Furthermore, customers no need to pay cash to buy bus ticket because they can pay the bus ticket by using deposit slip number order by bank. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by International Institute for Science, Technology and Education (IISTE): E-Journals