Boutique and luxury hotel guide Mr & Mrs Smith is set to launch its own online hotel booking system, SAMS (Smith Availability Management System).

The luxury guide has designed a new booking system, replacing its technology partner since 2005 Starfish (Travel Intelligence), that will integrate the entire 550-plus Smith collection.

All reservations, whether online or off, will be made from a single centralised database from the time of its launch in December 2009.

Hoteliers will be able to upload availability, manage inventory, introduce time-specific offers to fill quiet periods, generate production reports, and check their own accounting through a live online interface.

Hotels can also tailor conditions for each offer, package or room rate, as well as add room descriptions with attached high-quality imagery.

Tamara Heber-Percy, co-founder of Mr & Mrs Smith said: “Developing our own technology has been a priority for us this year to improve online and offline conversions. Helping our hotels feed through availability easily will ultimately make the customer journey more streamlined.

“We absolutely had to create something simple and flexible to use – especially as SAMS does not connect to GDS – and I am excited to say we have achieved that. From a business point of view, owning our own booking system means that we no longer share revenue with our technology provider, so we’ll have much more to offer affiliates and stakeholders.”

Plans for 2010 include direct connectivity to hotel property-management systems and rate distribution tools such as SynXis and Rate Tiger.

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By Gemma Sharkey

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