Group accommodation specialist, Reef Surf of Newquay, Cornwall has agreed a contract with Compsoft to develop a specialist booking system both for its growing number of properties and the surfing lessons it offers almost all year round.
The business comprises Reef Surf Lodge, Reef Surf School and Reef Surfing Centre, which offers beach hire, a beach café and a shop. The Surf Lodge has 18 bedrooms, which can accomodate a total of 109 guests, and a 90-cover bar and restaurant.
Founder Antony Rowett started the surf school from the back of a campervan nine years ago. "The demand for all-year-round surfing is so high that we open 12 months a year and run the school 10 months of the year too" he said.
Compsoft's bespoke application will manage group bookings taken by it's call-centre, also in Newquay. "We managed for a number of years with an almost totally manual process. Now we're growing the business with the acquisition of two further properties, one for group bookings and one for couples, the manual process just wouldn't stand up - we'd be in a total mess." said Carla Rowett, Reef Surf's proprietor.
Carla explains why they chose a bespoke system. "We'd looked at other applications on the market, of course, but everything we looked at was designed for typical hotel management. There are some good systems out there, but our business is different. We offer alternative accommodation with groups sharing rooms. This has the added complication of mixed gender that we have to efficiently manage - the off-the-shelf systems just couldn't cope with that and therefore didn't add enough value.
With Compsoft, we saw a great opportunity to get exactly what we needed to support our unique business requirements. The greatest benefit however, was the scalability that this offers our business. With Compsoft's help, we plan to extend appropriate parts of our booking process to the web too, which will add even greater scalability.
It's an exciting time for the business and we're pleased to have an opportunity to work with a professional company that we can trust."
Compsoft's Head of Business Development, Mark Tillison, commented "We're delighted to be working with Reef Surf and to help them grow their business. The back-office application will be created using our own Equinox database development environment, with plans to then extend the solution to the web using web services and Microsoft ASP.NET, sparing a good deal of human resource. The approach mirrors that of the recent Dial a Seat project completed earlier in the year, so we're confident that it will work well."
The project gets underway immediately to achieve delivery before the looming busy booking period.
Related Links
Reef Surf Lodge
Equinox
Microsoft ASP.NET
Dial a Seat project