Everyone in hospitality talks about pricing strategy, distribution mix, and guest experience. But ask who owns room assignment, and the room goes quiet.
Room assignment seems trivial – until you realise it decides whether a loyalty member feels recognised, whether housekeeping runs overtime, and whether that one guest leaves a five-star review or a revenge novel on Booking.com.
Most hotels still treat it as an afterthought or let the PMS auto-assign. In doing so, they surrender one of the last levers that blends human judgement and system logic.
Do guests care more than hotels?
Curiously, guests seem to give it more thought than hotel leadership. Why? If they are not travelling much, each hotel stay is an extraordinary thing in their lives, and – as all the marketing gurus tell us, ad nauseam – meant to be an “experience”. For the frequent traveller, it’s more a question of the stay being “smooth” – ask any guru, again – with everything out of the ordinary regarded as an unnecessary distraction or, worst case, impairment.
Both tend to remember being given the “undesirable” room more lividly than the rest of the experience – whether dramatically good, or dramatically unnoticeable. And talk about it. Online, and offline.
Do hotels let guests decide?
So there are tools out there to “personalise” room choice, and creating a revenue opportunity from offering this choice at zero cost to the hotelier. German developers GauVendi show what possibilities can be unlocked by turning your never-quite-the-same individual rooms into a personalisation tool that generates additional income. That’s the true definition of “value add”, no? Since it needs no extra input, magically creating value out of the thin air that’s been there anyways.
But this is guest facing, pre-stay only, and aimed at generating higher rates. There are other guest facing solutions for online check-in that let you choose your room number, as you do when checking in for your flight. None are universally useable across all or most tech stacks, and their real focus, in truth, is upselling. Also, “204” will not tell the guest all that much since numbers are often assigned quite random, not like the neat rows on a plane, with aisle or window seats clearly distinguishable. Even when they show the guest a floor plan, which lets them avoid the stairwell, it takes much to really provide the guest with enough information to make their optimal choice – which may well be unavailable, or get rescinded by hotel staff at the last moment.
Automation vs. intention
What every hotel can do is give manual room assignments a bit of thought. Even if they have a smart booking engine like GauVendi in place, or a room selection solution like ExpectMe, many guests do not choose their room. Be it due to paralysis triggered by too much choice, or simply because they pretend not to care (but complain afterwards), or because they cannot check in online, like group or travel agent bookings: There will always be arrivals without prior room assignment.
Many PMS “solve” this by auto-assigning rooms right upon receipt of the booking. Some offer hotels the option of auto-assignment based upon guest preferences – which works well with guests who have 1. stayed before, 2. found out what they actually prefer, 3. have made their preferences known (and the info actually made it into your PMS), but 4. have not settled on that one room they view as “theirs” after having stayed with you 5 times (since the room number is not a feature, usually).
The rest? They ticked “quiet room” on their favourite OTA. Aren’t all your rooms “quiet”, because who’d go selling “noisy” rooms?
Another question is, do you really want the guests to have the “run of the house” or should the ultimate decision rest upon you as the landlord? Here is a chance for the thoughtful hotel manager or staff to excel in their profession: cater to guests. While keeping the needs of your business in mind.
The human variable
However, their system might be set up to automatically assign a room or at least to suggest an optimum assignment upon check in. It takes much more effort to modify a prior assignment than to just go with it, and we’re all trained to “trust the system”, aren’t we?
Even when a guest shows up 20 minutes before check-in time and their pre-assigned room shows “clean/uninspected”. So much easier to say “check in is 2 pm…”, yes? Ironic though, when, at 2 pm sharp, the floor supervisor still hasn’t made it there (or internal communications run on post-its dropped at shift end), they still have to reassign to the room next door. The one that would have shown “inspected” even 20 minutes ago.
On the other hand, there are staff who will wantonly shuffle rooms around, maybe lacking other options to show creativity. Giving no thought to the possibility of there having been a reason a room was already assigned, they will happily unblock even rooms marked “no unblock”.
Both may be partially resulting from the daily stresses staff has to cope with. When I used to work the front desk, we – barely – had the staff to actually look at bookings, and usually made thoughtful decisions about it. These days, you often just try to process the check in queue as fast as possible, while answering the phone, shouting to the bellman to get #101’s luggage down, and making a mental note that the dry cleaner still hasn’t shown up even though the lady in the penthouse asked for her dress twice already. And of course, smile at the passing GM, who “just lets you know” his car was blocking some guest’s and could you please move it a little, since he’s really got to hurry to make the Zoom call with Brand Marketing.
Staff will not only be influenced by booking data they see, but by the guest they face. Regardless of how the guest booked, the decision will be influenced by personal factors. Agents may allocate the better room if the guest seems to be a nice person, or if they seem more ready to complain, or more ready to tip. Some will ask the guest their preferences, but be tripped by the quirks of guests more often than not: If you offer them choice, you might end up with a lengthy conversation about all the options, or be cut off by a “Just give me a room key!”.
Reservation agents are often in an even better position to give it serious thought, from their (hopefully) quiet office workplace. They are not influenced by being face to face with the guest. So they may make pretty good choices in room allocation – only to have them undone by front desk, who must check in that demanding CEO type right now and grab any room to do so, or by the housekeepers insisting they cannot possibly get #475 ready on time.
The cost of randomness
But when room assignment does work, it can be a quiet triumph that no one notices consciously… because everything simply works. And works to a plan.
While most will give precedence to loyalty members and patrons, many will consider OTA bookers as second most important. Why? Because OTA bookers are much more likely to leave a review. With their OTA. Or may be more quick to complain to their OTA to try and get some refund, if given half a chance.
Others will have their monetary benefit focused on and so want to assign “desirable” rooms to “desirable” rates, meaning in dynamic rate set ups allocation may be determined by the price the booking was made at.
Still others might have special policies to keep leisure and business travellers on different floors. Some will have corporate key accounts who get first dibs, or crews who must have the most quiet rooms.
Smart organisations may instruct staff to allocate rooms according to efficiency. One strategy is to fill the hotel from bottom to top or vice versa (depending on whether you must heat or chill the rooms), so housekeeping does not have to be all over the building to clean a room here, and one there. Or they might start to assign from close to the housekeeping office or service elevator, and leave the farthest rooms for last.
But there’s a reason good PMS change room status from inspected to clean overnight; rooms tend to get dusty even if unoccupied, if nothing else, so some rotate assignments evenly. When occupancy levels are low, some will close down floors for longer periods – but this means they will not only have to dust them off, but flush toilets, replace dried up shampoo, and air the room and bedding properly. Which, to be honest, will invariably catch you on the wrong foot, every now and then. Especially if forecasts are treated as something to be forwarded to HQ only, instead of using them as basis for your operational planning.
Lastly, there’s maintenance and FF&E considerations, which may dictate to use the largest or best equipped rooms only if absolutely necessary.
Conclusion
Clear policies won’t make you perfect, but they dramatically raise your odds. Whether you value efficiency, loyalty, or energy savings, most doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone – from reservations to housekeeping – knows which one comes first. And can then use initiative to expand on those policies. Which no algorithm can yet match.
In an industry obsessed with reinvention, sometimes the smallest systems are still the ones worth mastering.
