Blocking

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Blocking is the preparatory step, before opening hotel reservations, of allocating rooms to two or more blocks so that the hotel's reservation system will accept the correct number and type of reservations such that each hotel guest can be placed in a suitable room.

One challenge to blocking is that the hotel probably thinks of their inventory along different lines from the way the convention will think of them. Most hotels have between two and six different bed configurations, and within each bed configuration a small number of fanciness levels, with rooms of each bed configuration and level scattered through the hotel. In ordinary operations, almost all hotels will consider these rooms to be equivalent and will exchange guests between them at will to satisfy room readiness constraints at check-in time. Some hotels even consider different bed types to be equivalent, or consider smoking and non-smoking rooms equivalent, caring only about (say) how nice their view is when allocating rooms to reservations. When constructing a blocking, making sure that the convention attendees' needs *can* be met is only half the battle. Making sure that the blocking works with the front desk agents' training and not against it will ensure that the attendees' rooming needs are *actually* met.

The rest of this article lays out the blocking process for a typical hotel.

Before you begin

Get an accurate hotel room inventory from the hotel, showing every single room, its type and subtype according to the hotel's reservation system, whether it connects to any other rooms in the hotel, its handicap access status (many hotels have multiple access room types), any special features like doors to a patio that might not be reflected in the hotel's idea of subtype, and anything else you can get out of the hotel. Put this all in a spreadsheet, one row to a room.

Choose a number of blocks

Blocks for bed types, or not?

Some hotels can easily put, say, 80 Double/Double and 60 King rooms into the Quiet block, and have their reservation system actually sell that many rooms and tell attendees when one of the room types in the block is sold out. Some hotels can't do this and take the King vs Double to be a request, not a promise. Answer this question and do not let *any* other consideration drive whether you have separate blocks for, in this equation, Quiet Kings and Quiet Doubles. If the hotel uses Passkey, it is the former kind.

Blocks for set-aside rooms, or not?

Some hotels will easily allow the convention organizers, without providing a credit card and usually through a back door to their reservation system, to make a large reservation, or a few such reservations, as a way to set aside guest rooms that will be needed later (for dealers, for instance, if the dealers' selection is done after hotel reservation opens, or for convention functions or guests of honor or late-added program participants or late-recruited volunteers), and can easily transfer a room (or better yet, allow the convention organizers to transfer a room) from this set-aside reservation to a specific reservation when more information is known about who will be in it, or reduce the size of the reservation to make rooms available to the general membership when the convention determines that it does not meed them. If the hotel uses Passkey and gives you access, it is of this type.

Other hotels will allow convention organizers to set aside a block from which the general public are not allowed to make reservations, and can easily make or allow to be made a reservation in this block, or move rooms out of this block when the convention determines that it does not need them. Be careful! Many hotels claim that they will not let the general public book rooms in the restricted blocks, but their national-chain telephone agents might not get the memo, or might prefer to make a room reservation they shouldn't than make someone on the phone angry.

Hotels can be in zero, one, or both of the above types. If they are in the former type, combine your set-aside rooms with the ordinary rooms of the appropriate type and use hotel reservations to set aside reservations. If they are not, but they are in the latter type, make a special block (but be sure it will really protect your inventory). If they are in neither type, you are probably better off making a large number of small reservations and transferring them as needed, all using whatever mechanism is available to the attendees.

Blocks for rooms on the master bill, or not?

Some hotels will allow the convention organizers to identify rooms from the general reservation list to be put on the master bill. Other hotels can easily move reservations into a special block for this purpose. It is fine to do this whichever way the hotel prefers, but if you have a Master Bill block it should start out empty and have rooms added to it, because there is no way you will ever correctly predict how many and what type of rooms will be on the master bill.

Blocks for Staff, Shabbos, etc

Don't make separate blocks for these. There are too many other variables -- you can't assume that everyone in the Shabbos block wants a Quiet room, or that everyone on Staff actually wants to be near the Staff Den if they have to choose between that and proximity to function space.

Set up set-asides