The next experience I am waiting for is the ability to choose my own room. Empower your guests, and they will reward you with loyalty.
Every hotel has a Rooms Controller whose job is to allocate rooms to guests. The front desk has a little leeway to change the allocation depending on the situation. There are several factors affecting room allocation. Some of which are:
- Availability of rooms (inclusion list)
- Rooms scheduled for maintenance/remodeling (exclusion list)
- Number of guests per room
- Total number of guests (determines allocation of adjoining rooms)
- Age of guests (determines noise level)
- Guest status (VIP or Elite status gets preference)
- Length of stay (determines ability to upgrade)
- Pre-paid advance reservation or not
- Rooms not occupied for long time (need to allocate rooms on a regular basis to avoid dust collection)
- Group reservations (multiple rooms, adjoining rooms, etc.)
The above list is a small list of things a room controller thinks of, and still they make mistakes pissing off valued customers. So, it makes sense for a computer algorithm to determine and allocate rooms than a human being. Of course, the front desk manager should have the ability to override the allocation and assign a different room, if deemed fit. The algorithm can dynamically reallocate and shuffle rooms around whenever a guest arrives. This is the beauty of algorithms.
In today's day and age of computers and AI, the computer can make a better allocation of the room than a human room controller. Computers can crunch a large amount of customer data (personal, profile, preferences, past stays, etc) as well as hotel information and make better decisions for a better outcome.