Who is Five Star Systems? Five Star Systems was conceived as the result of a meeting between the president of a hotel software developer in Silicon Valley, California, and the owner of Bruern Cottages, an estate with a dozen self-catering cottages in the English Cotswolds. While there were numerous Property Management Systems designed for hotels on the market, it cost thousands rather than hundreds to implement them, and there were none that could calculate rates in accordance with the weekly booking and short break price model of the self-catering industry, as opposed to just charging a single fixed rate per day.

The scale, number and diversity of the tasks involved in the management of a successful self-catering operation At that time Bruern Cottages was managed using different systems for each task, of which some were manual and others computerised. (Anyone who has tried to automate a self-catering business will be familiar with the constraints and limitations of the various types of software available until now.) These systems included:

		A wallchart to keep track of bookings and availability.
		A booking system to generate invoices and booking confirmations.
		A printed availability chart to send out to enquirers.

		A manually updated availability calendar on the website.
		A spreadsheet given to the guest at the end of their stay, calculating their bill for various extras, such as food, wine etc.
		Another form linked to a PBX switchboard to calculate telephone call charges.
		A database to generate filtered searches for guests who have opted to receive information on late availability discounts etc.
		An email address book to enable those guests to be contacted.
		An accounting software package to enter the receipts and other financial information.

None of the above were integrated. This meant that, for each booking, some thirteen or so entries across the nine various systems were required, and none of them ever agreed with each other when an attempt was made to reconcile them. For example, the wallchart would have a cottage booked but there would be no record of this on the booking system, despite the fact that the internet calendar also showed it as booked (and therefore had taken it off the market); the accounting system would show money having been received, but it would not be clear from this whether this related to the cottage and week in question. As a result, it would not be unusual to spend upwards of eight man-hours a week attempting to undertake audit trails, in order to resolve discrepancies such as the one above.

Five Star is the integrated solution Five Star replaces the need for many entries in numerous systems with the capability to manage a booking with just one entry in a single integrated system, saving over half the time spent on administration, reducing paperwork by an even greater proportion and eliminating costly errors altogether. It achieves this by automating the management of every single day-to-day administrative task. What can Five Star do for my business?