Managing Hotel Reservations with Uncertain Arrivals

Gabriel R. Bitran and Stephen M. Gilbert
Additional contact information
Gabriel R. Bitran: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Stephen M. Gilbert: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

Operations Research, 1996, vol. 44, issue 1, 35-49

Abstract: Based on our interactions with managers at two large hotels, we present a realistic model of the hotel reservation problem. Unlike traditional models, ours does not assume that all customers arrive simultaneously on the targeted booking date. We explain why this assumption may not be appropriate for the hotel industry and develop a model of reservation booking which explicitly includes the room allocation decisions which are made on the targeted booking date. Based on observations of how the problem is solved in practice as well as the insights gained from this analysis, we develop simple heuristic procedures for accepting reservations. Computational results demonstrate that these heuristics perform well relative to an upper bound that is based on perfect information about reservations requests and customer arrivals.

Keywords: industries; hotel/motel: reservations planning; inventory/production; perishable/aging items: booking limits for hotel reservations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (42)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.44.1.35 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:oropre:v:44:y:1996:i:1:p:35-49

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().