ABOUT US
Welcome to Holiday Rental Management, where passion meets purpose!
The Story Behind PIMS
I guess that really should have said “About me”.
Having spent over 30 years in IT, predominantly in the design and product management of large computer systems for Market Research, I quit the rat race to spend time at our Villa in the pretty little town of Carvoeiro in the Portuguese Algarve.
When not in residence, the Villa was rented out to holidaymakers, and soon, realising the demand for self catering, I added a second property for Rental.
The Story Behind PIMS
It very soon became apparent that managing the process of Rentals was taking up a large chunk of my leisure time and unless I got it more organised, it would either take over my life, or chaos would result with double bookings, forgotten instructions to guests, confusion over payments and remembering who had paid what, when.
And so, out of a series of very complicated and messy spreadsheets, PIMS was born.
Right from the outset, I acknowledged that not all owners do it the same way, and so at the very heart of every new feature is as much flexibility as possible. While this has meant the development of the software itself has taken over my life, I’m thrilled to share the benefits now with a wide range of other owners and rental agents with portfolios of between 1 and 100+ properties from all over the world.
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The Origins of PIMS
Understanding the broad range of requirements was largely influenced by the amazingly useful comments that I read in an Internet forum for rental owners at LayMyHat.com.
The final product that is on offer today was designed and written by myself, using many ideas gleaned from LayMyHat contributors, but I must give credit to two people from that forum who got me going and without whom the system would still be a glint on my eye.
Acknowledgements
Brooke Simmons, who wrote her own system and was very happy to share the original code with me. By her own admission, this served more to highlight the gaps and improvements needed than to be used as a start point.
Juan Ramón Marquès, who helped me get started with mySQL and reviewed all the initial database designs as well as planning out the organisation of source code.
To these people, I am eternally grateful, but credit for any bugs and flaws in the current system belong entirely to me.
p.s. The name PIMS does not stand for anything. It was the original code name that we used during the design phase – and it stuck !
