Geoff Owen – Director West London Apartments

 

We started trading as a Serviced Apartment provider on the 1st March 2008 when we had the grand total of two apartments in the West Drayton Middlesex area.

We quickly grew over the next 3 years to around 30 apartments and  we had begun by using an Excel spreadsheet which enabled us to just about manage our guests and agents expectations with regards to giving availability.

We realised that we would have to get a system that was adaptable to our business and we approached a developer, Robert Austin, to ask him to develop something that would give us a scheduler along with other features such as invoicing, cleaning, maintenance, booking reports and aged debtors.

Rob decided to use Access as a programming tool and developed our PMS using this – this gave us all the features that we wanted as we expanded to 50-60 apartments.  Robert then approached us to explain that we had outgrown the system and that he thought that we should move to a web based PMS. Due to time constraints and our rapidly expanding business, Robert suggest we source and existing Serviced Apartment Management system from within the industry.

We tried several suppliers including Hospitality Impact, Elina, Travelstream and Guestline  – unfortunately all of these suppliers were very Hotel facing and couldn’t understand the needs of a Serviced Apartment Provider. Especially so in our case where we have many blocks with some blocks only having one or two of our apartments – the quotes from these suppliers were also very prohibitive and in our frustration we asked Robert whether he would consider converting our Access system to a web based system. He had grown his software development business to the extent where he was now employing other programmers and it seemed crazy not to ask him to take our system to the next level.

To our delight Robert agreed to implement this and with a tight time frame of 6 months Robert and his team began their task. We had an implementation date of the 1st August 2016 which was met and we successfully migrated our data from the old Access system to the new web-based system. Robert named the new PMS system SAMS – Serviced Apartment Management System – clear and concise – a PMS built for the serviced apartment industry only.

This SAMS system does everything that we as a serviced apartment provider need and we can thoroughly recommend it.