SoylentNews

martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

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 [doi.org])

Original Submission