Profile

The Barge Lady is a Chicago-area travel agency that specializes in barge cruises down scenic rivers in France, Germany and other locations throughout Europe. The Barge Lady's small staff specializes in personalized service to its customers, always making sure to "match make" between a customer's specific needs and desires and a barge cruise that lives up to and exceeds their every expectation. The Barge Lady staff has personally taken most of the cruises they offer and therefore truly know how to recommend just the right cruise for every unique guest that comes through The Barge Lady's "door".

Challenge

The Barge Lady had an existing FileMaker database that wasn't that great. It had been built by a friend of the company who knew something about FileMaker, but not a lot. The screens were not intuitive and the system required the users to know a lot about computers and many of the users were in fact "computer illiterates." Most users complained that the system was very difficult to understand and use. Also, there's a master spreadsheet report showing all bookings for the current year that was being tracked seperately in Excel that wasn't part of the FileMaker system so there was much double-entry going on.

Solution

Application Architects re-built the FileMaker system to add a clean interface, lots of automated data-entry and simple drop-down lists. We integrated the spreadsheet report which now extracts dynamic booking data right from the booking records and displays them on the screen. Also, there's some sophisticated calculations in use that help automatically compute how much commission The Barge Lady and its external travel agent partners get from each sale.

System

The database is fairly straightforward with an almost "too simple" interface, including bookings, agents, agencies, barges, barge routes, passenger lists and payments. A tabbed interface is in use as well as easy to understand buttons along the bottom of the screen. Users can run all kinds of reports right out of the system including invoices, confirmation letters and sales reports.

Special Features

Many times, couples travel in groups on a barge or even travel on several barges on the same trip, boarding one after the other, as they travel from river to river and port to port along their journey. This requires special handling as far as generating passenger lists, figuring out the billing, the commissions, etcetera. The system handles all of this automatically by allowing bookings to be linked together in different configurations.

However, t he system is no longer too rigid as to be prohibitive...there are checkboxes in the billing area for bookings where sometimes the agent commission is not subtracted and the other totals for the booking get altered to compensate.