Online Hotel Booking System: A Secure Three-Tier Web Platform for Direct Room Reservation and Administrative Analytics

Abstract

Direct hotel reservation remains difficult for many small and mid-sized properties that depend on telephone calls, walk-in registers, spreadsheets, or highcommission online travel agencies. This paper presents a complete web-based Online Hotel Booking System that supports hotel discovery, city/name search, roomavailability viewing, date-based reservation, automatic price calculation, simulated payment, booking-history management, and administrative analytics. The implementation follows a three-tier client-server architecture: a responsive HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript presentation layer, a Node.js/Express REST application layer, and a MySQL relational data layer. Six core tables—users, admin, hotels, rooms, bookings, and payments—are connected through foreign keys. JWTbased authentication, role-based authorization, bcrypt password hashing, parameterized queries, and one-hour token expiry secure customer and administrator operations. The project report records API responses below 300 ms under normal load, page rendering below 1.5 s, indexed MySQL lookups below 50 ms, successful handling of concurrent booking tests, and safe rejection of SQL-injection attempts. The resulting platform provides a commission-free and modifiable booking channel for hotels while demonstrating a practical full-stack architecture suitable for academic study and low-cost deployment. Keywords—hotel booking, room reservation, Node.js, Express.js, MySQL, REST API, JWT, role-based access control, web application.