Guests have proved unexpectedly receptive to the idea of online availability and booking. This is because the availability quoted on owners' websites is automatically kept up to date by Five Star in real time, and the price of their booking is quoted to them accurately online, whether for full weeks or short breaks. For guests, this means that they are guaranteed to avoid the delay and disappointment of emailing booking requests only to receive a response some time later, saying that the property was already booked. This benefits owners because any customer that has been through this frustrating process several times on other websites (and most of them have) will jump at the chance to make a booking on a site where the availability displayed is guaranteed to be up to date.

For owners, there is also an additional bonus: because they are offering guaranteed availability, they can ask for definite bookings i.e. with a credit card number. This filters out the timewasters, and saves properties from ending up empty as a result of being provisionally reserved and taken off the market by people who then subsequently disappear. Just as without an automated online availability quotation system, the customer frequently makes email booking requests only to be disappointed, without credit card details taken online, owners frequently find that they accept email booking requests (and therefore turn down other bookings) only to find that the customer has made similar requests elsewhere and then followed up one of them with a booking.

Of course, the reason that customers do this is to cover themselves in case of requested properties being unavailable. Five Star frees owners and customers from this mutually destructive vicious circle. Five Star is the only system currently capable of automatically calculating short break prices accurately on an owner's website, because it is uniquely flexible in that it conforms to owners' own price structures, calculating different percentages of the weekly rate according to whether the booking is a 3 day midweek, 4 day midweek, 3 day weekend etc. In addition, you have flexibility to vary rates according to the property and the season. And for each property and each season, you can specify what days you will allow bookings to start and end on, and what the minimum duration of a booking is.

You can even set the system to automatically offer discounts to favoured guests using passwords, as well as automatically deducting commissions for any number of travel agents, according to whatever agreement you have reached with them.