Allotment vs free sale: how much inventory to commit to agencies

Allotment means committing a block of rooms to an agency for a set period; free sale means committing none and letting the agency sell from live availability. The right amount is not a percentage but a decision per agency per season, based on your own pickup and release history and on whether the agency pays for unsold rooms.

Every autumn the same conversation: an agency asks for a bigger block than last year, and the contract arrives with last year's release period unchanged. The number you sign is not a forecast, it is a commitment, and it is far easier to check than to argue about later. This article explains how each model works, what a guarantee actually buys, what a late release really costs, and how to review your mix each season from your own numbers.

What does allotment vs free sale actually mean?#

An allotment is a block of rooms held for one agency for a defined period; free sale means the hotel commits no rooms and the agency sells from live availability. Neither term has an official definition in Turkish regulation, so the contract is the only source of truth.

Under an allotment, rooms are withdrawn from general inventory and held for the agency until a release date. The agency sells inside the block, and whatever is unsold returns to the hotel at release. In practice, "guaranteed" usually means the agency carries the financial risk on unsold rooms, and "non-guaranteed" means the rooms simply come back. Usage varies between companies, so read the clause rather than the label.

Free sale works differently: no block exists. The agency queries availability or reads a connected system, and the hotel controls the tap with stop sale and rate updates. On request is the manual cousin of free sale: one booking at a time, with the hotel answering yes or no. Here the product being sold is response speed.

In every model the hotel holds three levers: how many rooms, until when, and at what rate and terms. Most contract arguments are really about which of the three moves. Because no standards body or regulator defines these terms, write the definitions into the contract yourself: block size, release day count, release time of day, and what happens to unsold rooms.

What does contracted business look like in Türkiye?#

Package tours made up 28.2% of Türkiye's 2025 tourism spending, USD 18.20 billion, against USD 46.25 billion (71.8%) spent by individual travelers (KPMG Türkiye, "Turizm Sektörüne Bakış 2026", p.6, citing TÜİK). That measures the size of the organized market, not your share of it.

The figure measures how visitors' spending splits between trips bought as a package and trips assembled by the traveler. It is a spending split, not room nights, not bookings and not any hotel's channel mix. No official source publishes channel shares for Turkish hotels, so the only usable number is the one in your own system.

Agency is a legal term, not a compliment. In Türkiye, travel agencies are regulated under Law No. 1618, which requires an operating certificate (işletme belgesi) from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to trade as one. Ask for the certificate before you sign, and confirm the current licensing requirements and your own contractual obligations with a legal adviser.

Under Turkish consumer protection law, a package tour is a combination of at least two travel services, such as transport and accommodation, sold together for a single price. The practical consequence: your counterparty is buying your rooms as one component of a product it sells under its own terms, to its own customer, at its own price. Confirm the specific legal implications for your contracts with an adviser.

Demand in 2026 is flat. A contract that worked in a growing year does not automatically work in a flat one, because the rooms you block are rooms the market may not refill.

What does a guaranteed allotment buy the hotel, and what does it cost?#

It buys a base load of rooms you can plan staffing and cash around, and it costs you control of those rooms for the whole hold period, whether or not they sell.

What it buys: a known occupancy floor for a date range, earlier hiring and purchasing decisions, a partner with an incentive to market your property, and a rate agreed months ahead of the season. What it costs: rooms withdrawn from your own website, from booking sites and from free-sale agencies for the entire hold. If the agency underperforms, the loss never appears in a report, because you never see the bookings you could not take.

The distinction that decides everything is a guarantee with money behind it, where the agency pays or is charged for unsold rooms, versus a guarantee that is only a longer hold. Ask which one the clause creates before discussing the rate. For more on the rate side, see net rates for travel agents and how to quote them clearly.

Why does the operator push for certainty? Under Article 51 of Law No. 6502 the package organizer is responsible to the consumer when the contract is not performed or not performed properly, and the consumer can claim compensation for wasted holiday time (mevzuat.gov.tr, Law No. 6502, consolidated text, 1 November 2026 (opens in a new tab)). Certainty downstream is worth money upstream, and that money is negotiable.

Price the concession, not the rate: a guarantee normally comes with a lower rate, so compare the guaranteed rate against your own forecast for those dates, not against the agency's previous offer. Check the exact release date and time, cancellation and no-show treatment, whether unsold rooms are invoiced, what happens when you need a stop sale, and how force majeure is worded. If you cannot honor a confirmed booking, the contract is the only source for what happens next; take advice before you sign.

What does a late release cost on a non-guaranteed allotment?#

It costs the difference between what you could have sold those rooms for in the weeks they sat blocked and what you actually sold them for, which is sometimes nothing at all.

Rooms are blocked until the release date; unsold rooms return to inventory then. The release period is the hotel's only real protection in a non-guaranteed deal. Two failure modes exist. Released too late, the rooms come back after your booking curve has already passed, so you discount into a thin market or leave them empty. Released too early, the agency loses the ability to build and sell its product, and you return rooms it might have filled at its own rate.

Match the release date to your own booking curve for that date range. If most of your July business is on the books before May, a seven-day release protects almost nothing. Vary by date: peak dates justify short holds, shoulder dates can carry longer ones, because the cost of a blocked room is lower when demand is thinner. There is a pricing side effect too: while the block sits there, your public availability looks tighter than it is, and the market prices scarcity that does not exist.

The habit that fixes this: record the block, the pickup dates, the release date and what happened to each released room, every season, in the system that runs the hotel rather than in a file that dies in October. For the contract clauses behind these numbers, see release periods and clauses to check in hotel allotment contracts.

How does free sale work, and when is it the right choice?#

In free sale the hotel commits no rooms: the agency sells from live availability and the hotel closes the tap with a stop sale when it wants the room back. It works when your availability is accurate and your booking window is short.

The control lever is stop sale, and it only works if it propagates. A stop sale that reaches the agency an hour late is either a double sale or a lost booking. Free sale needs a reliable connection or a fast manual answer. The failure mode is silence: the agency asks, nobody replies, the traveler books elsewhere.

It suits late demand, short booking windows, shoulder dates and agencies whose volume does not justify a block. It does not suit an agency that needs certainty to assemble a package; refusing a block there means losing the contract, not winning the argument. The two models coexist with the same agency: a block for the core dates, free sale for everything around them. Write both into one contract so nobody has to guess which applies.

One inventory is the precondition. Every channel, including free-sale agencies, should read and write the same room count, or the model simply moves the overbooking risk from the agency to you. See running one room inventory across every channel.

How do you read your own pickup and release history?#

You compare, per agency and per date range, what was blocked, what was picked up and when, what was released, and what happened to those rooms afterwards.

Build the record from the hotel system, not a spreadsheet: block, pickup date, release date, post-release sale and final rate, per agency, per date range. The pickup curve is the diagnostic. An agency that sells most of its block in the last ten days before release is using your hotel as an option, not as a product.

Keep two counts side by side: rooms released and resold, which says the block was too big, and rooms released and left empty, which says the release came too late or the rate was wrong. Compare agencies on the same dates. A block that looks weak in August may be strong in April, and averaging across the season hides both. Include the cost side: what you sold the same room type for in your own channel in the same week. A block is only cheap or expensive relative to that number. One season is an anecdote. Two or three seasons of the same record turn contracting from an argument into a comparison.

How should the mix be reviewed each season?#

Review it once a year, before contracting, from your own numbers, and change one variable at a time: the block size, the release date or the guarantee.

The order of work: pull last season's record per agency, classify each block using the signals above, and only then decide what to offer. Set release dates from your booking curve for each date range, not from the agency's template, and write the day count and the time of day into the contract. Accept a guarantee only where the contract makes someone pay for unsold rooms. If it does not, negotiate a shorter hold instead, which is usually easier to win than a payment clause.

Keep a free-sale or on-request share for late demand and for agencies whose volume does not justify a block. It costs nothing to hold and it protects the last weeks before arrival. Write the review date and the reporting you expect into the contract, so next year's conversation opens with data instead of opinion.

There is no target percentage. The right mix is whatever your own history supports for those dates, and it changes with the season, the source market and the year. Demand in 2026 is flat, so do not let a larger block be absorbed by assumed growth. If the market is not growing, a bigger commitment has to come out of another channel. For the pricing side of that problem, see revenue decisions when demand is flat. Take the contract wording to your accountant or legal adviser. This article describes commercial practice, not law.

What to do next#

Before the next contract lands, pull one season of pickup and release data for each agency and put it next to the block you are being asked to sign. Commit rooms where someone pays for them, hold rooms only as long as your own booking curve justifies, and keep the rest on free sale or on request.