How Do Hotels Decide Which Room to Give You?

How Do Hotels Decide Which Room to Give You?

Ever wonder what goes on behind the computer screen behind the front desk? Like, how did they decide to put you in the smoking room when you asked for non-smoking? Or how did they give you a deluxe room with an ocean view when you only paid for a standard city view? Our Front Desk Guy, Aditya Rajaram, is here to tell you all about it. Got a question about the front desk? 

Room allocations at a hotel are quite complex. The juggling of different room types, VIP requests, accessible requirements and guarantees can be a very delicate task, which is often complicated by the hotels lay out whether it be oversized (Vegas!), historic (church!) and oddly designed (Berlin!)

Deciding which guest gets which rooms falls to one of the most multi-dimensional roles in the hotel, the rooms controller.

Not only is the rooms controller supposed to manage the inventory of the hotel and ensure that the hotel maximizes its revenue for the day, week, month and year, but also they must know the hotel’s priorities when it comes to their guests, namely which special requests supersede others. After all that they have to make sure they keep a few tricks (rooms) aside in case of any last minute problems and requests.

The rooms controller receives all the input from each department (sales, events, front office, housekeeping etc.) and then works to match all requests to the available rooms in order to maximize room revenue (always Goal #1.)

Most of the room booking is done at least three to five days out, with only minor changes to room blocks accommodated on the arrival day, depending on any last minute issues. For large events like weddings and conventions, the front office, housekeeping, and events teams work together for weeks in advance to ensure all room types are blocked as per the event contract so that there are no surprises from either side when the day arrives.

For a transient corporate/leisure traveller (not part of a group or event) rooms are allocated based on their guarantees, their loyalty status (gold/platinum guests are typically upgraded) and their VIP status (Lady Gaga would not be given a standard, double bedroom, if you catch my drift).

On any particular day, during the hotel's stand-up staff meeting (a 15-minute briefing of all the days events, VIP’s, strategy etc.) front desk staff are informed of the hotel status whether it's fully sold-out, or a quiet day with many room types available (this is when you could receive unexpected delighters in the form of room upgrades.).

From that moment on, when a guest comes to check in, the front desk agent already knows to what extent they have the freedom to change the room type assigned. The rooms controller would typically have allocated a room based on all the above mentioned statuses and also included specific comments such as ***VIP Do Not Move/Amenity In Room*** or ***Guest must have accessible room Do Not Move*** These comments typically alerts the front desk agent to clearly inform the guest of their room type and ensure them that all effort has been made to give their the best room available.

Sometimes, however, guests have reservations with minimal information, have paid the highest rate for a room type and only mention upon check-in that it is their wedding anniversary or birthday. At this point, the front desk staff, depending on the status of the hotel, would have the ability (if the hotel is serious about empowering their staff) to upgrade and change the room type assigned, assuming that it is not messing with the overall hotel inventory planning.

Many times a front desk staff would reach out to either the rooms controller or the front desk manager to double check that a variation from the original room assigned is allowed and then informs the guest of the last-minute change. This is also true for guests who want to change their view, bed type or even proximity to an elevator. Most front desks do have the authority and the common sense to accommodate each and every guest to the best of their ability as long as they don’t do it at the expense of significant loss of revenue or another guests’ guarantee.

The hotel’s primary job is to ensure complete guest satisfaction and if that means that hotel staff have to go out of their way to allocate the best possible room for the guest, then that is exactly what needs to be done. When hotel’s is sold-out, the ability to be flexible with guests’ requests does become challenging but front desk staff should be creative and honest with the guest and ensure that they are doing their best to manage expectations.

Many believe that room assignments are quite a computerized task. To the contrary, while revenue management systems do ensure the right reservations for the right days, it is actual people in reservations, front office and the front desk staff who use their best judgment to accommodate the best room types and categories in the best way possible. Not to forget housekeeping, who really are able to deliver clean rooms efficiently and give the hotel the most flexibility with room assignments.

source : http://bit.ly/1vko16E