Managing Motel Room Availability: Inventory, Sell-Outs & Length-of-Stay Strategy
Managing your available room inventory is a critical step to managing your occupancy and profitability. Sell all of your rooms to early and you can miss out on valuable revenue opportunities. It is important to setup reminders and run regular reviews of your upcoming 30, 90 and 365 days of bookings.
Avoid preselling 100% of your rooms
Once you are at 100% on a day as shown above for the 13/05/2025, you block the potential for taking bookings longer than one night. When we look at sold out dates at a property we look at a few things;
How far is the sell out date, the further out the hotel is becoming sold out the more potential lost multi-night bookings.
If you are pre-selling out or carry a lot of bookings for future dates then a rate review might be required.
Longer stay bookings will historically have a longer booking window. This means that your longer stay bookings will book further in advance to secure their room - this is not for all bookings and every property has their subtleties.
Dates that are in high demand need to be leveraged to increase occupancy on the dates either side - these are called the shoulder dates.
Increasing occupancy either side of a busy date
When we know that a date is going to likely sell out we want to maximize the properties revenue by trying to take bookings that will not just stay on the busy date but will also stay on the days either side. As the Motel Manager we need to put in place a strategy to do this. One option is to put in a length of stay rate restriction. Some of the key things we look at to work out this strategy;
How much demand is there for a date, is the whole city going to sell out?
If their is a huge amount of demand you might make all rooms a minimum length of stay of 2, 3 or more nights, where as if you don’t think there is as much demand then you could experiment with only one of your room types.
This is a case by case basis for each motel or hotel manager and can be evaluated on-going.
You might start with a 2 night minimum for all of your standard rooms, and then due to a lot of demand you increase the standard rooms to 3-night minimum and your executive rooms to a 2-night minimum.
