Cultuzz offers "free to download" hotel booking system

Cultuzz Digital Media GmbH has announced the launch of "free to download" hotel booking system as an Open Source product to hoteliers, owners of pensions, hotel chains and destination marketing organisations.
"They can all utilise this product and sell rooms directly from their own website without paying any fees. CultBooking is available on the platform www.sourceforge.net with its source code and under an open source license. Such a license permits anyone to study, change, and improve the software, and even to distribute the unmodified or modified system," stated an official release from the company.
It added: "CultBooking is used today by more than 300 hotels. The software is barrier-free design developed and includes all features a modern hotel booking software is expected to have. As a hotelier you can control your inventory anytime, from anywhere via an easy-to-use secure management area, you can `close-out' rooms or complete time periods with only a few mouse clicks, you can allow corporate customers to buy rooms with a unique discount code, and you can even start revenue management to maximise your hotel's profitability."
"Our motive for making the source code freely available is three-fold," said Michael Hughes, global director - sales and marketing. "Firstly hoteliers shouldn't pay fees for bookings on their own website. Secondly the product developments will embrace international diversity, and thirdly the hoteliers who use the system will access a constantly growing global distribution network and Cultuzz also."
A characteristic of CultBooking is the direct connectivity to numerous PMS and CRS systems such as: Velox, Medusa, Hotline, GMS, HotcheckWin and soon to be released Protel and HS/3. If a hotelier uses one of these systems, the availabilities and rates are supplied automatically from the hotel to their own web site and detailed reservations are returned via CultBooking automatically to the hotel. Therefore a key advantage for the user is a massive reduction in data administration, previously a costly and somewhat manual process that was often a source of errors, according to the company.
Cultuzz has additional ideas and features it will add to CultBooking continuously. By offering the source code for other developers the software will be improved constantly and shared with the broader tourism community. Based on PHP, MySQL and XML used in OTA standard (OTA = Open Travel Alliance) the system is completely royalty-free and perfect designed for today's web developers, says the company.