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Guests arrive and leave every single day. This creates gaps, idle time for your room that can stretch to 5, 7, or even 10 days. This costs you money, especially during high season when every stay counts. Gaps between check-ins mean lost money and drag down your average revenue per room.
How to Close the Gaps
Here is how booking often works: you get a request and a prepayment, and your front desk staff assigns a specific room to a guest. Then a booking gets cancelled or moved, or you have a few empty days between guests. Those gaps cost you money since you still have to pay salaries and for maintenance.
You could hire someone to manage this manually and shift check-ins around like a game of Tetris. It sounds simple, but in reality it is time-consuming, error-prone and a headache to manage.
Instead of booking specific rooms, we recommend booking by category. If a guest wants a suite, they book a suite category, and their room is assigned at check-in. This approach increases your room capacity by 5-12% and minimises gaps between stays.
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Why Booking by Category Works
You accommodate more guests in the same number of rooms, and your profits go up.
1. No more frantic gap-filling. Health resorts often run promotions and discounts just to fill empty rooms. Discounts lower your margins, and promotions cost money to advertise. Booking by category minimises idle time without all these expenses.
2. Rooms wear evenly. No more renovating the same popular rooms over and over because the system tracks how long each room has been in use and distributes guests accordingly.
3. Profitability increases. Selling more rooms at full price increases your revenue. Fixed costs like salaries, taxes, and grounds maintenance are divided among more guests, so each individual room becomes more profitable and your RevPAR goes up.
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You can also borrow a page from airlines’ book. Know you no-shows statistics and sell slightly more rooms than you have. In rare cases when every guest shows up, simply upgrade them to a higher room category at no extra charge. However, it only works for large resorts and requires a “buffer” of rooms. Otherwise even one double-booked guest can become a problem. If you have nowhere to put or relocate them, this may lead to a public conflict and a negative review.
The Downsides of Booking by Category
Booking by category makes it hard to offer personalized service. A loyal guest who comes every year might want the exact same room every time. If you say yes, you risk creating gaps and losing revenue.
But major hotel chains like InterContinental, Marriott, Hilton, and Radisson have already figured this out. They promise to try, but do not guarantee a specific room.
If you still want to offer this option, borrow an idea from airlines like Lufthansa, WizzAir, Emirates, and British Airways. They let passengers pay extra to choose their seats.
Here is how this works in Jivi:
- A guest fills out a booking form on your website, mentions their room preference in the comments or over the phone, and pays for their stay or makes a deposit.
- Your booking agent contacts them and offers the paid room selection service.
- If a guest agrees, you add the service, they pay by link or bank transfer, and your booking agent then manually assigns that specific room for their stay.
The price for this service should cover what you might lose if this room sits idle later. You could also make it a special perk for your top loyalty members, just keep these exceptions rare. Otherwise, the gap problem comes back.
Fewer Gaps, More Profit
Booking by category helps your health resort reduce idle time, increase room turnover, and sell more room nights without building extra facilities. This approach boosts occupancy in the high season, when lost revenue from cancellations hurts the most.