When the upgrade costs more than the system — Maekok River Village
Maekok River Village did not leave a bad system. They left a good one that had become expensive to keep current.
What Bryan Massingham said
These are his words, published on our home page:
We wanted an all-embracing hotel management system at an affordable price. Our previous system was very good, but in order to update it, a huge expenditure on both software and hardware was required. We chose Resort Manager because a respected business colleague had recommended it.
What is particularly good is that the system can be adapted to suit particular needs, and this was done effectively. The training was very good, and importantly, the follow-up sorting out of inevitable glitches was speedy, and the ongoing support is excellent.
Bryan Massingham, Owner / General Manager, Maekok River Village, Thailand
The situation this describes
This is a different story from Code Hotel's, and in some ways a more common one.
Nothing was broken. The previous system was "very good", and he says so plainly. The problem was what staying on it had come to cost. Keeping it current required heavy spending on software and hardware at the same time, which is the position a lot of long-established properties find themselves in after enough years on an on-premise system.
That is a genuinely hard decision, because the money buys you no new capability at all. You spend it to stand still.
The hardware half is the part people underestimate. A software upgrade that also demands new servers and new workstations is not a software upgrade, it is a capital project. It is also why our services cover the computer and network hardware side rather than leaving you to discover the requirement later.
He was referred. Not by an advertisement or a comparison site, but by a colleague he respected. That is how most of our customers have arrived, which is pleasant and is also precisely the weakness this website exists to address.
Everything he praises happened after the sale
Read the second paragraph again. He names adaptation to particular needs, training, speed of sorting out glitches, and ongoing support.
None of those appears on a feature comparison. They are what determines whether the system is still serving you in ten years, and they are the hardest things to judge before you buy. It is why hotels that installed Resort Manager in 2009 are still running it, which is worth more than any specification sheet we could publish.
Note also the honesty of "inevitable glitches". Every implementation has them. The question is never whether they occur, it is who deals with them and how fast.
If you are facing an upgrade bill
Worth working out before you commit to it:
- What does staying cost over five years, counting licences, hardware refresh and support, against replacing?
- What new capability does the upgrade actually deliver? If none, you are paying to stand still.
- Does the replacement need new hardware too? Ask early; get it in writing.
- Can it be adapted to how your property actually works, or must you adapt to it?
The quotation above is complete and unedited, and Maekok River Village gave it to us unprompted. We did not commission it.
Tell us what you are running now and what the upgrade quote looks like, and we will tell you honestly whether changing is worth it. If it is not, we would rather say so.
You can also read why Code Hotel left one of the three largest systems, and how Komune in Bali grew from thirty rooms to over a hundred on the system they started with.
Pricing depends on the property, so we quote it rather than list it.
Tell us which version you need, the modules you want and how many rooms you run, and we will put a proposal together. If Resort Manager is the wrong fit for the property, we will say so.