Six Rooms Oversold on Bihu Weekend
Hotel Brahmaputra Grand is a 48-room mid-market property in Guwahati. On the Friday before Bihu the hotel is sold out: 30 rooms are blocked for a wedding party, 8 for a film crew, and the rest are individual bookings. At 14:00 the front office discovers that 6 rooms are oversold. A week earlier a receptionist manually blocked rooms during renovation and the channel manager did not resend availability; two OTAs kept selling, and each guest holds a confirmed voucher with a number. Housekeeping is short-staffed: 5 of 8 attendants reported, three are on festival leave. Nine of the 12 departures due at noon are still not cleaned at 14:00, two rooms have faulty air-conditioning, and the wedding party has asked for five rooms by 11:00 the next morning for bridal makeup, although standard check-in is 14:00. The general manager wants a written action plan before the 16:00 shift briefing.
1. Draft the first 90 minutes of the recovery plan for the six oversold rooms: who is walked, in what order, what is offered, and what you say to each guest.
Read the worked answer
Rank by harm, not by who shouts loudest. Walking a guest means relocating them at the hotel's cost. Criteria: contractual weight, length of stay, vulnerability, and whether the guest has already arrived.
Order
- Never walk the wedding block or the film crew. The wedding is a 30-room contract with penalty exposure, and the crew has early call times - relocating either causes disproportionate harm and public reputational damage in a small city.
- From the six OTA bookings, walk single-night leisure guests first. They lose the least (one night, no routine to rebuild) and are easiest to re-accommodate.
- Keep families with children, elderly guests and anyone with a medical need in-house. A relocation that creates a health or safety problem converts a service failure into a liability.
- Keep the longest stays. A four-night guest is worth more and harder to recover later.
- Call guests who have not yet arrived before they reach the desk. Walking someone in front of a queue is the worst outcome for both sides.
What is offered: the prepaid night refunded in full, a free night voucher valid 12 months, free round-trip transfer, a room of equal or better category at a partner hotel, and a call from the duty manager the next morning. If the partner hotel is genuinely better, say so.
The script: own it in one sentence - 'We confirmed your room and we cannot honour it tonight; that is our error, and here is exactly what we have arranged.' Never blame the OTA or 'the system'. Get written acceptance on WhatsApp or email and log the voucher numbers.
Then close the leak: stop all channels for those six rooms immediately, inform the OTA partner desk, and record the root cause for the 16:00 briefing.
2. Sequence housekeeping work from 14:00 so the wedding rooms, the film crew and the arriving guests are all handled. State the order and the reasoning.
Read the worked answer
Work the constraints, not the list. With five attendants and nine dirty rooms, the binding constraints are engineering lead time, arrival times, and the fact that the bridal rooms are needed tomorrow morning, not this afternoon.
Order
- Engineering to the two AC rooms first (0–30 min). A technician needs lead time, and a failed AC on a sold-out Bihu night is a guaranteed complaint. Block both rooms out of inventory until cleared; if they cannot be fixed by 17:00, they become the next walk candidates.
- The nine departures, sorted by arrival time (14:00–18:00). Rooms for guests already in the lobby or arriving before 15:00 go first; 16:00–18:00 arrivals next. The front desk must give realistic times rather than 'ten minutes'.
- The five bridal rooms, prepped before the night shift ends. They are not urgent today, which is exactly why they get forgotten at 22:00. Assign one attendant to strip and dress them after the 18:00 peak, and confirm the 11:00 requirement in writing. Better still, offer access from 22:00 tonight - a room ready the night before removes tomorrow's risk entirely.
- Public areas and show rooms last.
Method with five people: pair two attendants on strip-and-block (about 20–25 minutes per room together), one on bathrooms, one as linen runner, and the supervisor inspects and updates the front desk every 30 minutes. Batch by floor to cut walking time, use the service lift, and cancel turndown tonight - it is discretionary work competing with a hard commitment.
Why this order: a room that is not ready for a guest standing at the desk is a live failure; a room needed in 20 hours is a scheduling task. Engineering and the front desk both need early warning, so they are informed first, not last.
3. Write the three-line prevention measure you would add to the 16:00 briefing so this does not recur next festival season.
Read the worked answer
The failure was procedural, not personal: a manual block in the PMS never reached the channel manager, so two OTAs kept selling inventory that no longer existed.
Three measures
- One owner, one log. Any manual block or rate change is entered by the duty manager only, recorded in a physical block register with time, room numbers, reason and initials, and the channel manager's availability is re-checked and screenshotted 15 minutes later.
- A daily two-way sync test. At 11:00 the reservations desk compares PMS availability against each OTA extranet for the next seven days. A two-minute check per channel catches the entire class of error.
- A festival buffer and a leave freeze. Hold 2% of inventory (one room in 48) unlisted during Bihu and similar peaks as a shock absorber, and freeze housekeeping leave for the three peak days, with compensatory off-days the following week agreed in advance.
Say it as an instruction, not a scolding: 'This happened because our process had a gap. From tomorrow these three steps are the process.' Add a line to the shift handover sheet so it survives staff changes. Prevention is cheap here - one relocation costs more than a year of two-minute checks.