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?