Hospio OS

Anyone running a hotel or guesthouse spends a surprising part of the day not with guests but with administration. Bookings come in via portals, by email and over the phone, and have to be transferred by hand into the occupancy plan and the guest list. A commission is due for every booking made through a portal — money the house has earned and hands over again. On top of that come enquiries answered in the evening after the shift, regular guests whose preferences are recorded in no system, and the constant worry of overlooking a double booking across all these parallel channels.

There are reasons it has come to this. The software landscape of the hotel trade has grown over decades: one program for the occupancy plan, one for the till, the website with the web designer, the bookings with the portals. The portals understood early on how important visibility on the internet is, and placed themselves between guest and house. As a result, houses sometimes pay commission even for guests who would have found their way to them directly — because booking through the house's own website is more cumbersome than booking through the portal.

A system that wants to solve this problem would have to make direct booking as easy as booking through a portal. It would have to keep rooms, prices, bookings and guest data in one place, so that no one transfers data from one list to the next any more and the occupancy plan always shows the actual state. And it would have to allow the guest to make a booking on the house's website that lands directly in the occupancy plan without any detour — commission-free, because no intermediary stands in between. The guest would remain the house's guest, not a platform's customer.

How guest data is handled matters particularly here. Names, stay dates and payment details are among the most sensitive things a house manages, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets clear requirements for them. Hospio OS is therefore designed so that data is held in the EU and the data belongs to the house — not to the software provider. The technology is deliberately open, so a house would not be tied to one provider if it later decides otherwise.

Hospio OS is in development and not yet in use with any customer. Our pilot operation is Landhaus Schend in the Vulkaneifel, whose day-to-day workings we use to test whether the system holds up in the everyday life of a real house. The plan is to build up room management, direct booking and guest communication step by step, and only open the system to further houses once these run reliably in the pilot. If you would like to know the current state, ask us — we will say honestly what is finished and what is not.