Why Can’t You Guarantee (a Certain Bed Size, a Certain Location, Connecting Rooms)?

You are uniquely you.  You have likes, dislikes and needs.  This uniqueness extends to your vacation.  You want specific things.  Perhaps you need a king sized bed, perhaps you prefer two double beds.  Maybe being near the restaurants is important to you, or maybe you prefer being close to the ocean.

When you imagine your vacation in your mind, the picture contains the perfect fulfillment of each of these requests.  What is so hard about making that reality match that picture?

Each hotel designates categories of rooms.  For the purpose of this discussion, let’s say that our hotel has roomtypes called “Garden View”, “Ocean View”, and “Ocean Front”.  Very simple, just three room types.

So, when someone buys a room at our fictional hotel, it will be one of these three types of rooms.  Within each roomtype, there are some with 2 double beds and some with king beds.  AND there are a few pairs of rooms in each roomtype that have a door connecting two rooms.  Our hotel is pretty well equipped to handle any sort of request situation.

Now, let’s say that we have a few nights where the hotel is just about full.  We have guests in every room.  Every day we have people checking in and checking out.

On this particular day we have 5 rooms checking out and 5 rooms checking in.  The 5 rooms checking in each have specific requests.  Two of them want to be adjoined to each other.  Two more want king beds because it is their honeymoon.  The other one wants to be near the pool.

Great.  The only problem is that the 5 rooms checking out contain no adjoining rooms.  They also all have double beds.  AND, none of them are near the pool.  None of the rooms we have becoming available meet the requests of the people checking in.  They’re the only rooms we have coming open!

Now, this example is simplified for the purposes of this blog post.  The reality of people checking in and out of hotels is a much more intense logic puzzle each and every day.  If you choose a great hotel, the people there very much want to give you exactly what you want.  They do, however, have to work within the limits of what is available to them to give.

Some hotels do designate specific bedding in roomtypes.  Also, some hotels sell connecting rooms as a specific roomtypes.  (And charge quite a premium too!)  If your request is something that will really make or break your vacation, you should be sure to tell your agent during the booking process so that our suggestions will only be hotels where we are able to guarantee such a request.  You should also be ready to pay what it will take to stay at a hotel that will fulfill what you’re wanting.

Isn’t that part of life though?  Balancing what we want with the resources we have available to us?