Migration & go-live

Switch systems without closing the front desk.

Changing the system that runs your property is the most nerve-racking thing an hotelier does. So here is exactly how it goes — week by week, what moves, who gets trained, and what happens to the reservations already sitting in your current system.

Typically 30 days No closed days We do the heavy lifting
1

Nothing is lost

Every future reservation, guest profile, deposit and issued invoice comes across — then gets reconciled against your old system line by line before anyone signs off.

2

You run both systems side by side

For a full week before cutover, ODA runs in parallel on real data. Your team learns on your own rooms and rates — not on a demo, and not while a guest waits at the counter.

3

One quiet hour, then you are live

Cutover happens overnight, after the night audit. The desk closes on the old system and opens on ODA the next morning with the same arrivals list.

The 30 days

What actually happens, week by week.

A typical single-property migration. A larger estate or messier data stretches this; a small guesthouse coming off spreadsheets often finishes sooner.

Week 1

Discovery and extraction

We sit with your team and map the property as it really works — room types, rate plans, seasons, board arrangements, taxes, services, and who needs which permissions. In parallel we pull the data out of your current system, whatever it is: a native export, a database dump, or a stack of spreadsheets.

You end the week with a written migration plan and a data inventory
Week 2

Your property, built in ODA

We configure the lot — inventory and room attributes, rate plans and restrictions, the tax engine for your jurisdiction, POS menus and price lists, user roles, and your branding on the booking engine and guest app. You review it and we adjust. Nothing is settled on our say-so.

You end the week with a working system loaded with your real setup
Week 3

Parallel run and training

Both systems run at once. Your team takes real bookings through ODA alongside the old system, and each department is trained on the screens it will actually use. We run test arrivals, departures, room moves, folio splits, refunds and a full night audit until nothing surprises anyone.

You end the week with a trained team and a signed-off data reconciliation
Week 4

Cutover and hypercare

We repoint your channels, run the final delta migration overnight and go live at your quietest hour. For the fortnight that follows, someone from the implementation team is on call daily — not a ticket queue, the people who built your configuration.

You end the week live, with two weeks of daily support to come
Data

What comes across.

All of it is migrated and then reconciled against your old system before go-live. If a number does not match, we do not cut over.

  • Future reservations — rates, extras, board and balances
  • Guest profiles and stay history, as far back as your data goes
  • Rate plans, seasons and restrictions
  • Room inventory, types and attributes
  • Tax rules — VAT, tourist and municipal
  • Issued invoices and credit notes, for fiscal continuity
  • Open folios and deposits already held
  • POS menus, price lists and modifiers
  • Staff accounts, roles and permissions

And the parts that need a decision

We will not pretend every migration is clean. Loyalty points and house accounts usually need mapping rather than copying, because two systems rarely count them the same way. Some older systems export only a couple of years of history — we take what exists and archive the rest as read-only files you keep. Free-text notes arrive as plain text, so formatting is lost. All of this is decided in week one, in writing, instead of being discovered in week four.

Cutover night

The switch itself takes about four hours.

Scheduled on your quietest night of the week, after the night audit has closed the day. Nobody ever checks in on two systems at once.

23:00
Night audit closes the old system

The last business day is closed and posted where it has always been, so your accounts have a clean break point.

23:30
Delta migration

Everything booked since the week-three snapshot is pulled across, so both systems hold an identical arrivals list for tomorrow.

01:00
Channels repointed

OTA connections move to ODA. Availability is frozen for the few minutes it takes, so no channel can sell the same room twice.

02:00
Reconciliation and sign-off

Arrivals, in-house count, open folios and deposits are compared against the old system. Your duty manager signs off before we stop for the night.

07:00
The desk opens on ODA

Same arrivals, same balances, new system — with someone from our team online with you through the first shift.

Training

Each department learns its own screens, not the whole system.

Delivered in your language, on your property's data, in sessions short enough to run between shifts. Every session is recorded, so a new starter in August is not left guessing.

Who Time What they learn
Front desk 2 × 90 min Arrivals, departures, room moves, folios, split billing, payments, refunds and the night audit.
Housekeeping 30 min The mobile board, room statuses and maintenance tickets with photos — on their own phones.
F&B and POS 60 min Taking orders, charging to the room, shift close and cash drawer handling.
Management 90 min Rates and restrictions, occupancy and RevPAR reporting, tax and compliance exports, user permissions.
Safety nets

What happens if it goes wrong.

  • Your old system stays readable. We ask you to keep it in read-only mode for 90 days after cutover, so there is always somewhere to look something up.
  • A full export of your data is handed to you before cutover, in open formats — yours to keep whether or not you continue with us.
  • A 30-day pilot on one property is billed at list price and credited against implementation if you convert.
  • Implementation is a fixed fee agreed up front — from €900 on Boutique, €2,000 on Resort. Migration work never runs on an open meter.
Questions

What hoteliers ask before switching.

Still weighing it up? Talk to sales — tell us which system you run today and we will tell you exactly how that migration has gone before.

We are mid-season. Can we still switch?

Yes, and it happens often. The parallel week exists precisely for this: your team is trained and confident before anything changes, and cutover is scheduled for your quietest night. That said, if your closed season is only a couple of months away, we will usually tell you to wait for it — it is a calmer migration and the price is the same.

Our data is a mess, and some of it lives in spreadsheets.

That is the normal case, not the exception. Spreadsheets are often easier to migrate than an ageing PMS, because nothing is locked in a proprietary format. Cleaning and de-duplicating is part of week one, and you approve the result before anything is loaded.

What if our current PMS will not let us export?

Very few can genuinely block you — your reservation and guest data belongs to you, and both most contracts and data-protection rules require it to be handed back in a usable format. Where a vendor drags its feet, we have extracted from database backups, reporting modules and screen exports before. Tell us which system you are on and we will tell you how we have handled it.

Do we lose our invoice history? Our tax authority requires it.

No. Issued invoices and credit notes migrate as immutable records, and your existing numbering series is continued rather than restarted, so the sequence an auditor checks stays unbroken. Where a jurisdiction also requires the old system to stay available for a retention period, we say so in the migration plan.

How much of the work lands on my team?

Roughly a day of a manager's time in week one, a couple of hours reviewing the configuration in week two, and the training sessions in week three. We do the extraction, mapping, loading and reconciliation. The one thing we cannot do is decide how your property should be set up — that needs someone who knows the house.

We run several properties. All at once?

No. We start with one — usually the most complex, because whatever we learn there makes the rest quick — then roll out the others on a schedule you set. Group implementations are quoted per estate.

What if we decide it is not working?

Your old system stays readable for 90 days and you hold a full export of your data from before cutover. Nobody has needed to reverse a go-live yet, but you are not locked in a room without a door.

Get a migration plan for your property.

Tell us which system you run today and how many rooms you have. You will get a week-by-week plan and a fixed implementation price — before you commit to anything.

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