I'm asking this question on behalf of a "friend of a friend" and have not yet spoken to the person directly.

Someone who runs a tourist/recreation attraction wants to set up an online system so that customers can book stays there.

He's looking for suggestions for software toward this purpose. I don't know how Net-savvy this person is or if his company even has a Website yet.

I'm presuming he'll want to accept credit card numbers through the site for confirmation.

Are there any scripts that can serve this purpose? If so, which ones, and are there any special server requirements?

Or are there hosting companies that specifically handle this kind of thing? Keep in mind that this would be for a smaller business. I suspect that the guy isn't very technologically adapt, and believe that this option would probably be his best bet.

TIA

check out www.hotscripts.com

lots of examples.

It takes more than a script-you'll need a database backend to store all the customer data, as well as the calendar itself.

Hosted ecommerce applications for service providers aren't quite here yet. Unlike the readily available shopping cart scripts and packages for purchasing goods, there aren't calendar systems or reservation systems with integrated credit card handling yet.

Such things currently require a proprietary development project involving database design and scripting-one of my friends in the industry is working on such a system for a railroad-and they usually run into many billable hours and are well out of the reach of smaller businesses.

I don't recommend it but you may be able to find someone who can build a site using Access as the back-end, they tend to work a bit cheaper than SQL coders.

Otherwise, you might be able to kludge something together that wouldn't be quite as dynamic or automatic, but would be affordable.