The allocation sheet says one thing, the hotel says another
Your programme uses twenty-odd hotels across a season. Each has a contract with a room allocation per departure, a mix of twins and doubles, a single room limit and a release date, often thirty or forty-five days before arrival. Someone typed all of this into a spreadsheet in January.
By May, the spreadsheet has been edited by three people. The hotel in Lucca emails to say it has released your rooms for a September date because nobody confirmed. Your bookings show fourteen passengers on that date. On another departure you are holding eight rooms and using five, and the hotel reminds you, politely, that unused rooms after release are charged under the contract.
Why the spreadsheet drifts
The allocation sheet is a copy of the contracts, and the bookings are somewhere else. The sheet only matches reality if someone updates it every time a booking is made, changed or cancelled, and every time a hotel agrees an extra room by email. In a small office that someone is also answering the phone.
- Room types matter: a sheet that counts rooms but not twins, doubles and singles hides the real shortage.
- Extra rooms agreed by email are not added to the sheet.
- Release dates are calculated by hand from arrival dates, and occasionally wrongly.
- Changes to departure dates are not carried through to every hotel on the itinerary.
- Multi-centre tours have several hotels per departure, each with its own dates.
Released rooms and unused rooms both cost you
When an allocation releases by mistake, you rebook at whatever the hotel has left, sometimes at a higher rate or not at all, and the itinerary you sold can change. When you hold rooms you do not use past the release date, the contract may charge for them. In between, hotel relationships suffer, and hotels that feel messed about offer less generous allocations next year.
Staff also lose time. Every query from a hotel starts with someone opening the contract, the sheet and the bookings, and working out which one is right.
An allocation tracker fed by your bookings
We build a tracker that holds the contracted allocation and compares it with actual rooms booked, every day.
- Contracts are loaded once per season: hotel, departure, room types and quantities, single room limits and the release rule. Where contracts arrive as PDFs, we can extract the allocation table with an AI step for a person to check before it is saved.
- Release dates are calculated from each arrival date and the release rule, so nobody works them out by hand.
- Rooms used are counted from your reservations system by room type, per hotel, per night, through its API or a nightly export.
- Extra rooms agreed with the hotel are added to the tracker as amendments, with the email attached, so the history is clear.
- Alerts go to the office before each release date: rooms held, rooms used, and a suggested action (confirm, release some, or request more).
- A one-click hotel update produces a short email or a list in the hotel's format showing what you are keeping and what you are releasing.
| Question from the hotel | Before | With the tracker |
|---|---|---|
| How many rooms do you need on the 14th? | Open three files and count | Rooms used by type, live |
| Did you agree an extra double? | Search the inbox | Amendment logged with email |
| Are you confirming before release? | Often forgotten | Alert sent in advance |
| Why are we holding eight rooms for five? | Nobody noticed | Flagged before the release date |
If your reservations system already has an allocation module that is not being used, we look at that first, because setting it up properly can be the cheaper answer.
A normal week with allocations under control
Each Monday the operations person sees a list of release dates in the next three weeks, one line per hotel per departure. Most need nothing more than a confirmation email, generated from the tracker. Two have spare rooms to release. One needs an extra twin, which is requested before the hotel fills up.
When a departure date moves, every hotel on the itinerary is updated together, and the tracker shows which hotels still need to confirm the new dates. When a hotel asks a question, the answer is on screen before the phone call ends.
Is this what your allocations look like?
- Allocations live in a spreadsheet that nobody fully trusts.
- Hotels have released rooms you needed because a date was missed.
- You have been charged for rooms held but not used.
- Room types are not tracked, only room totals.
- Extra rooms agreed by email are known only to the person who agreed them.