Is it OK to reserve hotel rooms and resell them as a business?

We won’t let you do it with ours, because we have no control over who you re-sell them to, and it becomes a security issue.

We have a company policy on “warehousing”: a room may only be rented to the actual guest, who will actually occupy it. It’s my only assurance that you’re not hiding Tad Cummins and his 15-year-old companion in there.

There are several online travel agencies to whom we make available a certain quantity of rooms, but they don’t actually reserve the rooms until they have a buyer — who, immediately upon their referral of that reservation to us, is subject to the same scrutiny as any other customer seeking to register as a guest. We have their full information. We’re not running a movie theatre or a football stadium, no one reserves rooms and, on the arrival date, shows up with a ticket entitling them to that room.

What reasons are there for a hotel to say that they don't have any rooms available, but a third party on behalf of the hotel does?

Not all property management systems work with online travel agencies, so what you'll frequently see is a certain number of rooms allocated to the OTA - that way, the hotel doesn't end up getting overbooked.



If it was a Choice-franchised hotel, Choice and Booking.com are well-known to not play and get along well together: Booking.com and Choice's proprietary front desk and reservations system don't interface or communicate one another: the hotel gets its Booking.com reservations via fax, and when you've sold the last room to a walk-in guest or in-house reservation, you'd better get on to Booking.com and tell them in a hurry, or else something very bad could happen.

In either event, what I'd do if I were cutting it close with available rooms is block as many as I had allocated to Booking.com (in which case, we wouldn't have any rooms available when you called us, but you could book one on Booking.com -- see Michael Forrest Jones' answer to In general, how can you get a reservation at a hotel if their website says they're fully booked? ). Or, if I was getting good rates on walk-in business that night, close us to arrivals on Booking.com and not take any more reservations from them.

Originally appeared on Quora

Why can't many hotel suites, including presidential suites, be booked online?

How many nights do you plan to stay? It can make a difference - and usually does..

A 'suite', with some exceptions (mostly semantic)*, is by definition not one but two rooms or more. We are rarely able to charge double the price of a standard room, and get any takers; despite the fact that the investment by the hotel and its owners in having it there is higher. (It costs more to furnish that living room than it does to furnish a bedroom, and the kitchen fixtures are where it starts to get really pricy.)


Presidential Suite at Radisson Royal Hotel in Moscow, Russia

We have to rent them at someone for some price, true. So, inside our pricing structure, you're already getting a 'discount' (what we call the 'drop'), and your travel agent didn't 'get' it for you. But we're getting a lower return on them for regular rooms, and we know it's going to take the housekeepers two to three times longer to make them for the next guest (depending upon the number of rooms in the suite).  So we're going to have to make that discount worth doing. 

Do hotels give out the most undesirable rooms at check-in by default? If so, why?

It happens but I wouldn't say it's something that happens altogether 'by default'.  See Michael Forrest Jones's answer to How do hotels assign rooms.

First of all, undesirable rooms are tricky to sell, at least to other than undesirable guests. We want the room to be fresh, clean, comfortable, everything in it in good condition and working; because we want you to like us, and like our hotel, and we want you come back (and if for no better reason than we don't like to hear you complain).  I take it that you mean undesirable as 'less to be desired than other rooms of generally equal size, furnishings and amenities' (say, because of not much of a view, or at the end of a long hallway, or it's because it's too close to an elevator or a vending area and you have to put up with the noise from that), a few of which will be present in any hotel.  



Also, keep in mind that in a well-maintained property, there won't be too much variation in the quality of the rooms - if any at all is noticeable. Some will have more space or amenities and will sell at a higher price. Some will be due for remodeling, if the hotel is large enough that remodeling is done in stages (e.g., they do one floor every couple of years, so that over a ten-year period, the rooms on all five floors get done and it's time to repeat the cycle) and where such a state of affairs is present, what I might do is price those rooms a little lower. But even then, the variation in quality isn't going to be that much: you shouldn't even notice it. As a practical matter, it can't be. Too many guests that come in are not shy at all about wanting the best room in the house at a discount off what the guy in the cheapest room is paying.

Arriving early to a hotel, I often hear "your room is not ready yet." Do hotels reserve you a particular room or do patrons simply have a spot in the hotel reserved for them?

We have a certain number of spots - rooms - reserved for a certain number of guests, and one of them is you.

As for the bad news, "your room is not ready yet" . . . Is it your own darn fault?  You'd be amazed at how frequently it could be!



We tell people (or we're supposed to tell them, although rushed desk clerks taking reservations, or reservations agents, frequently forget to mention it, or people don't read it on the webpage when making their reservation...), check in time is at 3:00.  

What time do people begin arriving?  That's right -- whenever they show up . . . wanting to be checked in to their room right away . . . 

But the housekeepers need that much time to clean the rooms from the night before.  (This is also the root of the flipside of the same problem - people overstaying checkout: Michael Forrest Jones' answer to How lenient are hotels when it comes to checking out late? )

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.

Why do hotels have a check-in/check-out time? Could 24 hours (i.e anytime) check-in checkout be a differentiator?

If we have a room ready for you, we'll generally let you check in prior to three. Usually if we don't, it's not because we're being mean, it's because logistics can be a problem (Michael Forrest Jones' answer to Arriving early to a hotel, I often hear "your room is not ready yet." Do hotels reserve you a particular room or do patrons simply have a spot in the hotel reserved for them?)



Giving you a late check-out if you wish is frequently more tricky, but even that can be negotiated if you approach it in a considerate manner. (Michael Forrest Jones' answer to How lenient are hotels when it comes to checking out late? |Michael Forrest Jones' answer to How long after checkout time can I leave my hotel room without incurring fees or hassle? )  Here again, we're not trying to be difficult, but we have logistics issues around that. 

One of my first hotels after making the transition from hourly employee to management was a too-large hotel (Michael Forrest Jones' answer to What do hotels do with unused guest rooms?) in not an altogether great highway location, with not that many demand generators nearby -- but among the demand generators we did have was a couple of truck terminals. So I worked it out with one of those to allow the drivers to rent the room in 24-hour blocks: if the driver checked out after the housekeepers went home, we'd just 'roll' the room and let them clean it the next day. 

But we had the extra rooms and a vacancy problem, and no one else was going to rent them anyway, so we could afford to do that -- and we needed the business. It was a little extra recordkeeping for the clerks to stay on top of, but not that many hotels have an incentive to take that on. Most hotels, like it or not, have to stay in sync with the general human biological clock.

Originally appeared on Quora