How do hotels assign rooms to guests?

However the desk clerk wants.

There is some planning that might go into it for a well-run hotel, however. (Every hotel will do what works best for that particular hotel.) 

• You want to match the room type with the needs of the guest and what he or she is willing to pay for. Families generally get double-doubles (that's your standard, mark-one-mod-zero 'hotel room' with two double beds, and the trend in better hotels is going to two queen beds in such rooms). Couples, or people traveling alone, like a room with one king bed. Cheaper hotels have a room with one double bed - a single - for people who don't want to pay a lot of money. (What the guest asks for is the ultimate guide, to the extent practicable at all, but if you're going to make the call based on no more info than "how many people?...")

• Reservations have priority: we've already made a commitment to those people and we have to honor it. Advance reservations also make better advance planning possible.
• We try to honor smoking preferences, but cannot always. The industry trend toward 100% non-smoking properties, and the legislative trend toward mandating a minimum number of non-smoking rooms in every property if they allow smoking rooms at all, is making it harder, not easier (this is why if you're a smoker, it's more difficult to get a smoking room; and it's also why if you're a non-smoker, you're so much more likely to get a non-smoking room that's been smoked in . . .). Blame whoever voted for your mindless elected officials who really seem to think, if you refuse to provide smokers with ashtrays, they'll 'see the light' and kick the habit. (Current North Carolina law requires that 80% of the rooms in every hotel be set aside as non-smoking - and North Carolina has always been the biggest tobacco-producing state. In an older, cheaper, economy motel that relies on business from traveling construction crews . . . good luck.)
• Speaking of which (and getting off on a tangent...), smoking in a non-smoking room is very, very bad - worse than you probably realize if you smoke. It can smell pretty clean to you, but a non-smoker can pick up on it instantly, days later. It doesn't vent as well as you think, even if you hide in a bathroom and turn on the blower (which doesn't work half the time) to do it. No wonder they want to penalize you to the tune of $250. Please don't do it. I know the new non-smoking policies are awkward for smokers - I like to smoke, too - but that's not the solution.
• Occasionally, you'll have an area of rooms that are better than average (recent remodeling, perhaps), and you save those for regulars or people you want to take extra care to impress. Occasionally, you'll have an area of rooms that are showing greater or usual wear (overdue for remodeling). You save those for local people, construction crews, people not likely to complain if they're assigned to them.
• You want to keep noisy people - families or groups with kids, or groups of college students - isolated from people who might complain about noise. You want to keep old folks who like it quiet isolated from people who might make noise for them to complain about. (Little old ladies who call the desk at 2am to complain about things that go bump in the night from a neighboring room put the night auditor in a heck of a bind. He'll go check it out, and all seems quiet. If he knocks on the door, he'll wake the guest inside and have two very unhappy guests. What is he to do? . . .)
• I've seen rooms in some properties set aside as 'pet rooms': they're clean, they don't smell bad, but guests with pets are always assigned to them (often, it's because of their proximity to a good spot on the property to walk Rover . . .). The remaining rooms are kept 'pet free' for the benefit of people with allergies and sensitivity to dander.
• Until you get into the pricier hotels, you don't have that many price and amenity tiers among the rooms. Everybody wants the nicest room in the house at a discount off what the guy in the cheapest room is paying, so selling the deluxe rooms and suites can be tricky, unless a guest has a particular need for something that can be had only in that room. We try to sneak them up on people: give them an upgrade once in awhile, as a surprise, hoping a guest will get attached to that room and at least rent it on a regular basis even if he or she isn't willing to pay extra for it.
• A newer, well-designed hotel will accommodate even better 'zoning' of guests. You want your double-doubles closer to the elevators: they tend to be occupied by noisy families or groups. You want your kings and suites loaded further up the hall: they tend to be rented to single people, couples, and older folks who want it quiet. That way, the further up the hall you go, the quieter it's going to be. And among the doubles, you want the ones closest to the elevators to be furnished with four sets of towels: the remaining doubles on that floor can make do with three sets, and the clerk can assign the rooms based on the number of people who will occupy that room. Everybody has adequate towels (the clerk can usually give you more, but he's not the towel guy: I like to see better housekeeping planning than that), and the laundry isn't washing, drying and folding extra towels that nobody used; because each room has the right number of towels for the number of people in it.
• Wherever practicable, for security reasons, I like to keep a few rooms on the first floor, within 'screaming distance' of the front desk, set aside for women traveling alone or with small children. If someone tries to get into one of those rooms, a stalker, perhaps; I want the desk clerk or night auditor on it right away. (Personally, I don't play and get along well with bad hotel security; and can be very inhospitable to someone loitering on the property for no good reason, anywhere on the property. Chances are, anyone you see doing that is up to no good.)
• 'Shrinking the house', as noted by another response to this same question, is attempted in some places. But in the coldest part of winter or the hottest part of summer, just the opposite may happen: heat or air might be left on in every three or four rooms on each side of a corridor throughout the hotel, so the entire property doesn't get chilly in the winter, or hot as an oven in the summer. (Smaller properties usually have a PTAC unit - that classic combination heat/AC device under the window in each room - and do not have central heat and air.  In an older, sprawling, two-story wood frame property in Pennsylvania where I once worked, freezing pipes in the winter was a concern). These rooms get rented first, and the room is already warm, or cool, when the guest checks in.
• I've never seen any effort to 'wear-level' rooms: basically, it's accepted that the rooms will wear at different rates (when it comes time to remodel, you can do a limited number of rooms and save a few bucks.) One thing you do want to take care about: don't let a room or section of rooms go unused for weeks or months at a time if you have low occupancy. If that happens, when you do finally rent the room to someone, everything is covered with dust, it's all musty, and there's a ring of calcium-whatever in the toilet.
• Beginning in the '80's, building codes required a couple of wheelchair-accessible rooms in every hotel (don't count on an older property having any, unless it's undergone a serious remodeling in the years since). The Americans With Disabilities Act requires more for newer hotels, cross-sectioned by floor and by room type - at least one accessible double-double, at least one accessible king, at least one on the second floor, at least one on the third, etc. One or two of these rooms, depending on the size of the property, must be outfitted with various hearing-assistive equipment for the hearing impaired (a doorbell that triggers a flashing light, a TDY phone, etc.). Under a new ADA requirement passed this past year, accessible rooms may not be rented to anyone other than a disabled individual who needs that type of room, until all other rooms in the hotel have been rented.

This is one I'll have to come back and edit and add to more as I have time, but hopefully I've covered the basics...

Originally appeared on Quora