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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)
(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 ...
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... 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.