Data Model Business Scenario: Geology Tours Overview of the Business:
Kilauea Volcano Crater Tours was created to drive tourism back to the Big Island of Hawaii after the 2017 eruptions ended. It was created by state monument officials, and it uses local academic geologists to create (and lead) a series of crater tours. To date, its promotional efforts and most of its sales have been concentrated on the Western United States. Over the past three years the company’s rate of growth has continued to accelerate. Kilauea Volcano Crater Tours now hopes to take advantage of this opportunity by extending the reach of its promotional and sales efforts to other major urban markets through the Midwest and East Coast, including New York, Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Chicago. Such a move places the company at the threshold of unprecedented growth. On the other hand, Jason Momoa, president of Kilauea Volcano Crater Tours, has recently expressed doubts about whether the company’s current approach to order processing, tour creation, and customer relationship management can keep up with the anticipated increase in demand. He has also begun to complain about being unable to get the kinds of information about customers’ needs and purchasing patterns that he’ll need in order to raise an aggressive and well-targeted marketing campaign in these new regional markets. A description of Kilauea Volcano Crater Tours’ business process and the data involved in that process follows. Business Process:
For each geologist, the database should keep track of the geologist’s name, highest degree held, and current university affiliation. A geologist who participates in the program usually will stay at the volcanic park for a few weeks, and will therefore typically lead many tours during his/her stay. Each tour, however, is led by just one geologist. For each tour, officials want to record the geologist who leads the tour, the date and time-of-day the tour takes place, and a description of the route the tour takes through the crater. (There are no “standard” routes, and the geologist is free to choose where to go on any given tour.) More than one tour may take place in any given day, and it’s even conceivable that two tours might leave at the same time. The database must also keep track of the tourists who sign up for these tours. In this case, we only need to record the person who actually does the signing-up; for example, where a father signs up a family of five for a tour, the database will only have a record for the father. For each tourist (defined in this way), the database should keep track of the tourist’s name, home state, and the number of people in his/her party. Obviously, the database must also identify which tour the tourist is signing up for. A tour can (and usually does) accommodate more than one tourist and his/her party. Also, there is no restriction on how many times a given tourist can sign up to tour the crater. At the end of each tour, each tourist (again, this is the person of record in the database) is given the opportunity to submit a card giving comments on his/her experience on the tour. Volcanic park officials would like the database to have a field for recording those comments.