The Australian Software That Checked Into Hotels Around the World
2004 Consensus Award Winners
Centium Software – GuestPoint® | Consensus Software Award Winner 2011
In 2011, the accommodation industry was undergoing a fundamental shift.
Online bookings were rapidly changing the way travellers found and reserved accommodation, but many smaller hotels, motels and regional properties were still managing reservations through systems that had not been designed for an increasingly connected world.
Centium Software saw the opportunity.
The Brisbane-based technology company developed GuestPoint®, an accommodation management platform purpose-built for small to medium-sized properties.
Rather than requiring independent accommodation operators to piece together multiple systems, GuestPoint brought property management and online booking technology into a single platform.
It incorporated reservations, online inventory, dynamic rates, web bookings and guest management while focusing heavily on something enterprise software often overlooked: usability.
Centium took an unusually practical approach to developing the technology. Its developers drew on direct experience operating accommodation businesses, with programmers even spending time working at hotel reception desks to better understand how the software would actually be used.
That approach caught the attention of the Consensus judges.
In 2011, GuestPoint received a Consensus Software Award, with the judging panel recognising its combination of innovation, usability, internet booking integration and practical understanding of the accommodation industry.
It wouldn't be the last time GuestPoint was recognised.
The same year, Centium became a National Winner at the iAwards in the Tourism and Hospitality category.
Then came international recognition.
In 2012, Centium Software competed against businesses from around the world in the International Business Awards, where GuestPoint received a Silver Stevie Award for Best New Product or Service of the Year – Software.
More than 3,200 nominations from organisations across over 50 countries and territories were submitted to the International Business Awards that year.
By then, GuestPoint was no longer simply an Australian accommodation software product.
Centium had offices in Australia, the United States and United Kingdom, servicing customers across Europe, North America, Africa and the Asia Pacific.
But Centium's story didn't stop with GuestPoint.
The company's founders continued developing technology for the hospitality and events industries, including EventsAIR, a cloud-based event management platform that would itself later receive recognition from Consensus.
The evolution demonstrated something important about the company Consensus had recognised in 2011: Centium wasn't simply building one successful piece of software.
It was building a culture of innovation around industries its founders understood deeply.
For Consensus, GuestPoint represents exactly the type of emerging technology the Awards were designed to identify.
A practical Australian idea, developed around a genuine industry problem, independently recognised for its innovation and subsequently validated on both the national and international stage.
Before GuestPoint collected international accolades and expanded across multiple global markets, Consensus recognised the potential of the technology behind it.