Hello whiterabbit.
First of all thank you for the detailed instructions.
SambaPOS is a community project. For now I'm the only code contributor but I hope we'll attract more developer attention to the project in the future. I mean this project is nobody's. You own it like you own the park next to your home or any community place in your city. So anybody who have time can help us for better features.
We are developing newer version of SambaPOS under github.com. You can read more about V3 version here
http://emreeren.github.com/SambaPOS-3/In this version I'm planing to create better support for hotel use. Booking features are not ready yet but primarily I want to solve some issues you mentioned.
V3 version have a feature called resources. By creating a resource template you will be able to define different types of tables and you can create accounts for them. That means tables and customers are different resource types and you can add more resource types called "room" or anything else. So we may have accounts tied to rooms like customer accounts.
Keeping tickets open until it gets paid is not a good practice. When we finish using it we should close it by moving the amount to the room account. At the end we may move it to a customer account for later pay or directly close room account by receiving payments.
We have another feature called "resource states" for keeping record of state change dates of resources (rooms in your case) such as available, occupied, cleaning, etc. If we list all tickets created after state changed to occupied we'll know what sold to a room after it occupied.
What we need to do is optimize these features for hotel use and implement other needed features for easier usage. If you like the idea and want to help us on V3 development by suggesting and testing features we'll be happy to hear from you. You may have more information about downloading nightly releases from the link.
Thanks.