Travel Technology - Software/workflow to manage a hotel?

My friend is planning to open a hotel (just a small B&B, a dozen of rooms) and asked me to help with the IT part.

Could anybody proficient in this field give a couple of advices? I see there are plenty of hotel management apps - which ones you'd suggest to look at? He'd like just to set prices, manage bookings (make, cancel, change, etc), print out the bill and have some statistics. Web booking would also be nice to have. More features would be a plus (like printing out room cleaning list for housekeeping, etc) but aren't required.

Are open source apps as good as commercial ones, like in web server market, or commercial apps have an edge in this field?

What is a common approach, do the apps reside on the server and are accesed remotely by the owner in admin mode and clients in client mode, or are they usually stored locally with a link to the homepage?


(A completely separate can of worms) If he wants to appear on booking engines like hotels.com, hrs.de, booking.com, I guess you have to make an agreement with each of them?

How are the bookings synchronized then? Do you assign a subset of rooms to each engine or just cancel the overbooked ones?


I'm digging through all the info I can find now but hints from somebody who has already gone throuh this would be appreciated!

Any suggestions for more appropriate forums to ask these questions? Where do the insiders of hospitality industry dwell? :)

My friend is planning to open a hotel (just a small B&B, a dozen of rooms) and asked me to help with the IT part.

Could anybody proficient in this field give a couple of advices? I see there are plenty of hotel management apps - which ones you'd suggest to look at? He'd like just to set prices, manage bookings (make, cancel, change, etc), print out the bill and have some statistics. Web booking would also be nice to have. More features would be a plus (like printing out room cleaning list for housekeeping, etc) but aren't required.

Are open source apps as good as commercial ones, like in web server market, or commercial apps have an edge in this field?

What is a common approach, do the apps reside on the server and are accesed remotely by the owner in admin mode and clients in client mode, or are they usually stored locally with a link to the homepage?


(A completely separate can of worms) If he wants to appear on booking engines like hotels.com, hrs.de, booking.com, I guess you have to make an agreement with each of them?

How are the bookings synchronized then? Do you assign a subset of rooms to each engine or just cancel the overbooked ones?


I'm digging through all the info I can find now but hints from somebody who has already gone throuh this would be appreciated!

Any suggestions for more appropriate forums to ask these questions? Where do the insiders of hospitality industry dwell? :)

Is your friend/you looking for total free or pm me with a budget size.... Open source software is good if you have someone who is an expert on the technology behind it.... (i.e. if you are savvy on python ... I wouldn't recommend getting an open source package built on java)

Most packages are moving to the web/client side of the house as this gives access to your package from employees/employers/customers/housekeeping etc.. within one website per se

Yes to get your listings on those booking engines usually not only requires an agreement (pricing/listing).. there's also the type of interface.. like if you will want to load your rates into a GDS/GNE etc...... there are various options out there...assignment of rooms would depend on the interface you have with the various engines... there are ones that let you "load" your rates in for a period or ones they synchronize with your in-house software (interface)...

Yhpm. :)