from the whereas-in-the-movie-"Inception",-they-could-have-based-room-allocation-on-Frogger dept.
Tetris is no longer just a game, but an algorithm that ensures maximum hotel room occupancy:
To achieve full occupancy, hotels used to rely exclusively on experience, concentration and human abilities. Then came online booking, which made the reservation collection process faster, but did not solve the risk of turning down long stays because of rooms previously booked for short stays.
To avoid overbooking (accepting more reservations than there is room for) in some cases online sales are blocked before hotels are completely booked. The solution that the University of Trento has just discovered could change the life of hotels by increasing the number of occupied rooms and, therefore, in the revenue of hotel owners.
[...] "The intuition of the RoomTetris algorithm—[Roberto Battiti] says—derives from the Tetris game, which is well-known among scientists and video game enthusiasts around the world. Colored tiles of different shapes fall in the playing field and players must place them so that they do not build up, therefore they have to fit the blocks in the best way possible in the free cells".
He continues: "If the average profit of a hotel is 10-15% of the turnover, the increased room availability generated by the algorithm in the high season can increase it by a further 5-10% (depending on the average occupancy rate and the duration of the stay). With little effort (which is actually made by powerful computers in the cloud) there are certainly cases where the profitability can even double. I bet that within a few years almost all hotels will use our optimal algorithm, and that many hotel management habits will therefore change radically".
In practice, with RoomTetris hotels will no longer allocate rooms at the time of booking, but when guests arrive at the hotel, providing the optimal solution for a higher occupancy rate and increased profitability.
"The success of RoomTetris, which is the first optimal room allocation algorithm for the hotel industry, suggests that the room allocation process can be managed by this algorithm at check-in, ensuring the best possible performance, at global level," concludes Battiti.
The graphic in the linked story helps to make the Tetris connection much clearer.
I'm wondering how well this will hold up versus people making reservations who have always had room xyz since their honeymoon?
Journal Reference:
Roberto Battiti, Mauro Brunato, Filippo Battiti. RoomTetris: an optimal procedure for committing rooms to reservations in hotels, Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology (DOI: 10.1108/JHTT-08-2019-0108)
Related Stories
Multiple sites are reporting on 13-year-old Tetris player, Willis Gibson, also known as Blue Scuti, who played until the NES version gave out. New play methods, such as rolling and hypertapping, were needed to reach a skill level where one can play as long as endurance and the software hold out. In his case it took over half an hour on the NES using rolling:
Blue Scuti is a Tetris prodigy who employs the "rolling" controller technique, a new way of holding and using the NES controller that was popularized in 2021. Rolling surpassed "hyper tapping," which requires players to tap the controller's D-pad 12 times per second, as the fastest and best way of playing Tetris. Rolling is a method where players roll their fingers on the bottom of an NES controller and use that pressure to push the controller into their other hand, which presses the D-pad to move the blocks. With rolling, players can push the D-pad at least 20 times per second, which is fast enough to theoretically play the game until it breaks. The technique has completely revolutionized competitive Tetris over the last few years.
Also at Tom's Hardware, Tetris was finally beaten after 34 years, game kill screen pops up at Level 157 — hypertapping and rolling were key techniques and the BBC, Tetris: How a US teenager achieved the 'impossible' and what his feat tells us about human capabilities.
Previously:
(2023) Hackers' Delight: a History of MIT Pranks and Hacks
(2023) Tetris' Creators Reveal the Game's Greatest Unsolved Mysteries
(2021) Tetris is no Longer Just a Game, but an Algorithm that Ensures Maximum Hotel Room Occupancy
(2014) Happy 30th Birthday Tetris!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @12:09PM (1 child)
First there needs to be more than just a few travelers...the timing of this development leaves something to be desired!
If/when there are high seasons again and hotels are fully booked, I'm not looking forward to this new optimizing algorithm. The idea that "...the room allocation process can be managed by this algorithm at check-in, ensuring the best possible performance, at global level," sounds to me like arriving a little late is going to leave me searching for a room.
Hopefully there will still be "late arrival" (prepaid) reservations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @03:54PM
Yes, I'm not really sure how this is any different from when airlines overbook their flights and have to bump somebody other than the fact that now somebody is without a room for an entire night if they screw it up.And at peak season there may not even be another room in town, especially if there's a significant convention in town.
This kind of mindless capitalism is a big part of why we need to remove the incentive for doing so by raising taxes on the richest and putting into place more regulations to protect people against this. I don't see how this anti-customer practice is going to be any different from all the other ones that basically all the other competitors adopt after the first couple chains do.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday January 15 2021, @12:13PM (1 child)
Can't claim I never really thought about how or when hotels did assign the rooms. The solution here is then to assign rooms at arrival instead of at booking. Which I guess in Tetris terms would allow you to have fewer dead or empty spots which is the inevitable doom of any game of Tetris. In that regard it makes a lot of sense to assign at arrival, you can also steer the people then to fill up floors (like you fill up rows in Tetris) -- which also means you can more efficiently assign cleaning crews and such I would imagine.
But still there must be some kind of pools of bookings, for various types of rooms and services and such. I guess nobody is sad if they get a room upgrade on arrival but I gather a lot of people would be quite upset if they are somehow downgraded in room quality upon arrival due to all the rooms they wanted are already assigned to other guests. I didn't read the paper, yet, so there might be something in there about that.
Still I would hate to stay in ...
*-
**
-*
... that room (the z- and s-shapes)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fakefuck39 on Friday January 15 2021, @10:34PM
they are assigned on arrival. in fact, this article is solving a problem that existed maybe 20 years ago, but not for a long, long time. the hotels solved it all on their own. literally everything the article talks about - blocking off rooms online, keeping a buffer, etc, is something they either made up, or is information from the last century.
hotels overbook all rooms. they soft-assign rooms on check-in and make sure they're vacated and serviced, and hard-assign on arrival.
source: 20 years of travel, lifetime hilton diamond, and was marriott platinum for a decade. I have spent thousands and thousands of nights at hotels. this article is bs.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday January 15 2021, @12:25PM (1 child)
Also while this has somewhat changed from game implementation to game implementation in a lot of games of Tetris you actually see part of the queue, sort of like the next or the next two-three pieces that will arrive. Then in some implementations you can save or store a piece (tetris99 has that as I recall it). That helps planning a lot. Those things would be gone here and can't be part of the algorithm then. Still part of the algo then is to actually know what is coming down the pipeline, if you assign at arrival that isn't helpful since the pipeline is unknown or not looked at, or?
Still when I book a room I expect that room to be there when I arrive. If it isn't I would be kind of upset. It might not matter so much for a hotel room in my own country, I can always get another one easily (hopefully) but if I go to the other side of the world where I know nobody, the city or the system I might be a lot more upset.
I guess if you pay an extra upfront fee you can book an exact room number?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Saturday January 16 2021, @03:26PM
Most Tetris products since the 2001 release of Tetris Worlds have a mechanic nicknamed infinite spin [harddrop.com]. You can just let a piece fall and keep moving it around, and so long as you shift or rotate the piece at least every half a second, you can keep a piece from sticking indefinitely.
"I'm ridin' spinners, I'm ridin' spinners, they don't stop" [ytmnd.com]
[also blocks]
(Score: 1) by WeekendMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @01:19PM (1 child)
So I book months in advance for a vacation and arrive late in the day, after touring the area and I'm given a room by the elevator. But a person who booked their room at the check-in desk, earlier that day, gets the sea view?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snospar on Friday January 15 2021, @01:54PM
The algorithm is only there to maximise hotel profits, it has no concern over whether or not you enjoy your holiday or any part of the booking process. If you left it really late you could be enjoying your holiday in one of their "sister" hotels (the one with the roach problem that doesn't offer food and doesn't have a bar). But remember that someone somewhere is enjoying their lovely, lovely profits.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @02:03PM
"We've solved the problem of reservations by not making them until you arrive!"
Genius /s
(Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @03:27PM (1 child)
Use government power to sell a valuable government building to your private company.
Turn that building into a hotel.
Manipulate government purchasing of hotel rooms to buy from your hotel at inflated prices.
When government officials travel to a foreign country, if one of your hotels is within even a hundred miles of their destination, make sure they must stay at your hotel. This will require the host country to lock down many roads, inconveniencing the citizens. A large government entourage can drive far out of their way of nearby hotels to use your overpriced hotel.
Make sure you take frequent trips to one of your own hotels, causing long term grief not to mention significant expense to the city your hotel is located at. Do this frequently enough that you exhaust the annual presidential travel budget within a short time.
Trump Hotels:
* Kourteous
* Klean
* Konvenient
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @09:53PM
Or you could just you know be a drug and sex addicted pedophile son of a sitting VP, and peddle the influence of your father to get sweetheart deals to keep yourself coked up. That way you don't actually need all that infrastructure invesment of 30+ years you know.
Sleepy Joe pedo network
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @05:24PM (2 children)
This is has it been done for YEARS already!!! I did hotel software from 1981 to 2000. Hotels as small as 10 rooms to 4000 and complexs with 24,000 rooms.
NO HOTEL in the right miond will pre-BLOCK rooms. It had 0 effectiveness. It costed real money with increased overhead costs. We had one hotel in Canada that pre-blocked EVERY reservation for up to a year in advanced. They wondered why they had issues.
The big issue is limited resources and sales methods agreeing. To show the problem, say you have 4 rooms. 2 blue and 2 red, 1 of each is king (sleeps 2) and other is 2 doubles (sleeps 4). If you take a reservation for a king, and then one for a blue room. How many rooms do you have to sell? short answer is 2 rooms. But is that 2 Red? Is that 2 Doubles?
Thaat is why Room Types were used. The type was what you sold by. That also included the admenitiy type (quailty of service). We had addded in late 80's Class of Room Types for hotels wanting to have less Room Types to sell but still support quailty breaks. Like Suite vs Rooms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @09:55PM
Cool story bro.
Much better than that derivitives bullsgit I keep hearing about
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @09:11PM
I stayed at hundreds of hotels over the years. Pretty much at 0 point was 'your room 132 was pre booked'. They usually literally picked it right in front of me. I figured it was by type and floor. Going every other room floor by floor and then start filling in the other 'odd' rooms and staying away from the 'crap rooms' until it was absolutely necessary. I had one of those 'crap rooms' once in a very nice high end hotel because I showed up so late. It was clearly a former hallway converted into a room.
My usual walk up to the desk involved
'i have a reservation'.
'oh yeah lets look you up, oh we have you for 3 nights, with at least a blah blah type room'
'sound about right'
'lets find you a room quick'
5 mins of going thru some charts later.
One handing over of keys/room card creation, creditcard, and then some paperwork later. I am onto my room.
Sometimes in the 5 mins of 'going thru charts' may be a quick call 'is floor xyz cleaned yet?'
I figured they were even/odd filling just to keep house cleaning on the same floors when occupancy was low.
Even when I was with a group we were usually scattered across the whole building. There is no 'tetris' involved with this. There big twist is what hotels did for decades before them, "pick room at check in'. Which is pretty much what most of them probably were doing already.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @05:37PM (2 children)
You mean how will a generalized solution to a generalized problem hold up against special-snowflake syndrome? One of two ways. The correct way (Manager: "fuck 'em!"), or the most likely way (Manager: "the customer is always right!").
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @09:13PM
Like when you about to order drinks but the manager tells you tgere was a mistake and quietly ushers you to a hastily assembled table in the restroom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @09:13PM
Money clears up that issue.
Nothing say you can not reserve a particular room in advance *IF* you agree to pay no matter what.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:20PM
I think this is just reinventing something that has already been done and giving it a more marketable name.
Anyway such algorithms won't matter much if your occupancy rates are low:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/206825/hotel-occupancy-rate-by-region/ [statista.com]