Manage Hotel Rooming Lists and Arrivals

The hotel wants your room block by Friday, and all you have is a guest list where some people booked their own rooms, two colleagues are sharing, and one guest's departure date is a day before her arrival. Accommodation Manager runs the whole accommodation side of an event as four connected steps: Guests, Rooming list, Arrivals and Labels. Every step reads the same project, so the dates you enter once drive the room count, the block request and the pickup lists.

The quick version: mark who needs a stay and set their dates, let the rooming list build itself from them, fix what it warns about, send the block request and print the labels.

Step 1: mark who needs a room

The first step opens Guest List Tracker. Each guest has a "needs a stay" flag, an arrival date and a departure date, and the step's note counts how many guests need a stay. Only guests with the flag, both dates and a departure after the arrival will be picked up later, so spend your time here. Guests who declined are never picked up.

Step 2: build the rooming list

The Rooming list step is Rooming List Planner. Type the hotel name, then press the button that adds rooms for guests who need a stay: it creates one booking per qualifying guest with the arrival as check-in and the departure as check-out. A guest already in the list is not added twice. You can also add bookings by hand, with hotel, room type, check-in, check-out and "shared with".

Check-out is the morning the guest leaves, so check-in on 10 October and check-out on 11 October is one night. The page rejects a booking whose check-out is not after check-in.

Sharing is where lists go wrong, and the tool handles it with one rule: if A shares with B, and B is in the list on the same dates and the same hotel, the pair counts as one room, whether or not B points back at A. Different dates for the pair produce a warning. A guest who shares with someone not in the list also produces a warning, and so does a guest booked into two rooms on overlapping nights, which is an error.

A worked example: the offsite sample

Press Try a sample and open the Rooming list. The sample offsite has three bookings at Harbour Hotel: Maya Patel in a King for two nights from 12 November, Lukas Meyer in a Twin for the same nights who shares with Fatima Al-Sayed, and Amara Okafor in an Accessible king for one night. Fatima is not in the list yet, and the page tells you two things: Lukas shares with Fatima, who is not in the rooming list, and Fatima needs a room but is not listed.

Enter Harbour Hotel as the hotel and press the add-rooms button. Fatima is added with check-in 12 November and check-out 14 November. Her dates and hotel match Lukas's, so the two share one physical room and both warnings disappear.

The summary then reads 3 rooms, 5 room nights and 4 guests. The block request text says:

• Peak night: 12 November with 3 rooms.
• Rooms needed each night: 12 November, 3 rooms for 4 guests; 13 November, 2 rooms for 3 guests.
• By room type: King 1, Twin 1, Accessible king 1.

That is the message the hotel needs. It counts nights, so the hotel can hold three rooms on the first night and two on the second, instead of three for both.

Step 3: check arrivals

The Arrivals step opens Arrivals and Departures Board, which groups the same dates into days. Use it to line up your front desk or a shuttle with the days on which most people arrive. In the sample, four guests arrive on 12 November and the busiest departure day is the 14th. The board also flags guests who need a stay but lack dates and guests who depart before they arrive. A full walk-through is in plan guest arrivals and departures for shuttles.

Step 4: print labels

The last step opens Label Sheet Maker. It prints text onto Avery-style label sheets on US Letter or A4, or onto a grid you measure yourself. Use "Use guest names from my project" to fill one label per guest who has not declined, with the organisation on a second line, then add room numbers once the hotel sends them. Print a test page on plain paper first and hold it against a real sheet, and set the printer to 100 percent or Actual size, because Fit to page shifts text off the labels.

Steps

1. In Guest List Tracker, set who needs a stay and enter arrival and departure dates.
2. In Rooming list, enter the hotel and add rooms for guests who need a stay. Add room types and sharing by hand.
3. Read the warnings and fix each: overlapping bookings, missing roommates, mismatched dates, guests with no room.
4. Copy the block request and send it to the hotel with a request for a cut-off date after which unused rooms are released.
5. Download the rooming list as CSV or PDF for the hotel and your team.
6. Check arrivals and departures, then print labels.
7. Save the project, which is erased when the tab closes.

Accommodation Manager is a Premium Application with 2 trial uses a day before a day pass or plan applies; each CSV, PDF or label download inside a step counts as one usage, and copying the block request is not metered.

Common mistakes

Counting guests when you should count rooms: two people in one room are one room night per night, not two. Booking the room block by guest count instead of by night, so the hotel holds rooms on nights nobody needs them. Entering check-out as the last night rather than the morning of departure, which adds a night to everyone. Forgetting guests who booked their own rooms; leave their needs-a-stay flag off so they do not appear. Sending the hotel a list that still has warnings.

Summary

Set the stay and the dates once, let the rooming list build and count itself, clear the warnings and send the block request with a cut-off date. Accommodation Manager keeps rooms, arrivals and labels in step. More tools for events are listed under event tools.

Open Accommodation Manager→

Do your hotels ask for a different block format than a night-by-night count? Tell us what yours needs on the contact page.