Built by operators,
for operators.

The spreadsheet that started it all

If you run an accommodation business on MotoPress Hotel Booking, you probably know the spreadsheet. The one with 200 cells, a formula for every season, and a colour-coded system that only makes sense to you. The one you dread opening every year when it's time to update rates.

I know that spreadsheet well. I built it.

My name is Sascha, and I run Unplug Rentals — a caravan hire business in Western Australia. Every year, the same ritual: recalculate seasonal rates across multiple accommodation types, factor in length-of-stay discounts and occupancy surcharges, then manually enter every figure into MPHB. One room type at a time, one season at a time, hoping I didn't transpose a number somewhere along the way.

MotoPress Hotel Booking is excellent at what it does — managing bookings, availability, and guest communication. But rate management? That's always been on us. And for anyone running more than a couple of room types across multiple seasons, "on us" means hours of repetitive, error-prone work with no undo button.

Smart Rate Engine exists because I got tired of that spreadsheet.

Fifteen years of knowing what operators need

I didn't come to this from a software background. My career started in the mid-nineties building websites by hand — writing HTML in a text editor before visual design tools were even an option — and freelancing as a web designer through university. From there I moved into consulting for a company in the German housing rental market, working with property managers and developers on the systems side of the business.

But the real education came from hospitality. Over fifteen years across hotel management, car rental operations, and eventually building and running my own caravan hire agency, I learned something that most software developers never experience: what it actually feels like to manage rates, seasons, and bookings when it's your business on the line. When a pricing mistake costs you revenue. When a manual process eats an afternoon you don't have.

Why Arvanel exists

Smart Rate Engine is the first plugin in a suite we're building to extend MotoPress Hotel Booking. The gaps in rate management were the most urgent pain point, so that's where we started. But there are more operational problems in this space that deserve proper tooling — rental agreements, bond processing, inventory tracking — and we intend to address them.

Arvanel exists to build these tools properly. Not as generic WordPress plugins that sort of work for hospitality, but as precision instruments designed by someone who has actually run the operations they support. We're a small, focused company, and that's by design. Every plugin we release has been tested in a real production environment — our own — before it reaches yours.

SRE has been running on UnplugRentals.com in production since before it was submitted to WordPress.org. We didn't build this for someone else and hope it works. We built it for ourselves first, proved it works, and then packaged it for the wider MPHB community.

What we believe

Accommodation operators shouldn't need a developer on retainer to manage their pricing. The tools should be smart enough to handle the complexity, simple enough to trust, and careful enough to protect your data. That's what we build.

If you're running MPHB and you've ever dreaded the annual rate update, we built Smart Rate Engine for you — because we built it for us first.