How a hotel reservations department works: from request to arrival

A hotel reservations department turns enquiries into confirmed, guaranteed bookings and hands them to the front desk ready for arrival. It captures the request once, quotes from set rates, holds options with a written expiry, confirms and guarantees, records changes and cancellations, and checks the book daily for expiring options and unguaranteed arrivals.

At 09:40 a request arrives by email. At 09:45 the same guest calls the desk. By 10:00 a third person has written the dates on a notepad. Nothing is wrong with the staff; what is missing is an office that owns the booking from request to arrival. This guide describes what a reservations department does at each step: intake, quoting, options, confirmation and guarantee, changes and cancellations, the hand-off to the front desk, and the daily checks that keep the book honest. After reading, you can write the two or three rules your hotel is missing and start running them this week.

What does a hotel reservations department own?#

The reservations office owns the booking record from the first enquiry to the moment the guest arrives: what was asked, what was quoted, what was promised, and what still has to happen before check-in. It does not own the price list, the channel mix or the guest's stay.

Concretely, the office owns intake, quoting from published rates, options and their expiry, confirmation and guarantee, changes and cancellations, group and agency requests, arrival notes and the daily checks on the book. Revenue owns rate levels and restrictions; reservations applies them and flags exceptions upward instead of inventing a discount at the phone. Distribution owns which channels sell and at what terms; reservations keeps the availability those channels see accurate, and nothing more.

The front desk owns the guest from arrival onward. It should never be renegotiating room type or rate at check-in because the booking record was thin. In a small independent hotel one person may wear all three hats, but the record must still show which hat was worn at each step. The working test is simple: can someone who was not in the conversation reconstruct the booking, and its promises, from the record alone?

What should you capture on the first request?#

Capture everything needed to quote and later to confirm, once, at the first contact, so that no later step has to ask the guest the same question again.

Start with arrival and departure dates, nights, adults, children and their ages, because child pricing and room capacity both depend on it. Record room type and bed preference, the number of rooms, and whether the guest will accept an alternative if the first choice is full. Note the rate basis (room only, breakfast, half board) and the source of the request: direct, travel agency, corporate account or an online travel agency.

Collect contact details that actually reach the deciding person: an email plus a phone number, and the name of whoever will confirm. Separate requests from promises: "high floor requested" is a note, while "connecting rooms guaranteed" is a commitment the hotel must keep. Guarantee intention and expected arrival time matter too, because a late arrival changes the no-show decision on the arrival day. Finally, record who took the request and when it came in; a request with no timestamp cannot be prioritised against the next twenty.

Options and tentative bookings: when does a held room go back?#

An option holds a room for a stated period and then releases it automatically. If nobody wrote the expiry down, the room is neither sold nor available, and the hotel finds out at the worst moment.

Every option needs four things: room type and count, the rate quoted, an expiry date and time, and the name of the person who may confirm it. Expiry should be enforced by the system, not by memory; a diary note is the first thing dropped on a busy morning. Follow-up is one reminder before expiry, then release. Releasing is a recorded decision, not a failure.

Terminology is not standard. CoStar Group's STR Benchmark Forward STAR Data Reporting Guidelines (opens in a new tab) (1 November 2026) note that booking-status terms such as definite, confirmed, tentative and optional are interpreted in different ways across the industry. A hotel should therefore define its own words in writing, in the confirmation and in the system.

The same guidance says rooms negotiated with a vendor need not be reported as booked until a reservation is made against them and deducted from inventory, and that cancellations appear as negative pickup. That is the real difference between a block sitting on the books and rooms actually taken. Tentative group blocks behave like options at scale: they need a cut-off date, a release rule and one named contact who can confirm.

Confirmation, guarantee and deposit: what makes a booking definite?#

A booking is definite when the hotel has confirmed it in writing and holds a guarantee it can charge if the guest does not arrive. A verbal yes and a hopeful email are neither.

The confirmation is a document: dates, room type, rate basis, total, the cancellation terms quoted at booking, the guarantee method and a booking reference. Guarantee methods differ in how they are collected later: a card with permission to charge, a deposit received by transfer, an agency voucher, or a corporate letter of guarantee. Each protects the hotel differently, and the booking record should say which one applies.

The terms quoted at booking are the terms that apply; vague wording is argued about months later, so keep the wording short and identical everywhere. Deposits need a deadline and a rule for partial payment; a deposit promised but not received leaves the booking unguaranteed in practice. Non-guaranteed bookings need a release time on the arrival day, decided once and applied the same way every day. Record who confirmed and when, because most disputes are about what was said, not about the price. Clear terms are worth writing carefully, and the same short wording should appear on the confirmation, the website and the guest app.

How should changes, cancellations and no-shows be handled?#

Every change creates a new version of the booking rather than erasing the old one, so the hotel can see what was agreed, what changed and who approved it.

Record the old value, the new value, the time and the person. A date change can move a booking into a different rate period, so the new total is re-quoted and confirmed in writing. Decide in advance who may approve an exception, such as waiving a fee or moving a date; otherwise the answer depends on who happens to answer the phone.

On cancellation, check the deadline against the terms quoted, record the exact time, and release the room at once so it can be resold. No-shows are decided on the arrival day after the release time, based on whether the booking was guaranteed; charging, releasing or reinstating is a procedure, not an improvisation, and we cover the decision in detail in when to charge, release or reinstate a no-show.

Duplicates are a reservations problem before they are a front desk problem: the same guest booked twice through two sources should be caught in the daily check, not at check-in. The causes are usually structural, as described in how double bookings happen across channels. Keep a reason code on every cancellation: "changed plans", "found cheaper", "flight cancelled" tells revenue something, while a blank record tells nothing.

How does reservations hand the booking to the front desk?#

The hand-off is complete when the desk can receive the guest without asking a question the reservations office could already have answered.

Arrival notes carry the expected time, special requests marked as requested or promised, repeat-guest or VIP status, and billing instructions stating who pays for what. Groups need a rooming list, the block cut-off, master account instructions and one named person at the agency who can confirm changes; see group blocks, rooming lists and the master folio for the full workflow.

Billing routing is a reservations instruction, not a check-in decision: a room charge to a company account and extras to the guest should be settled before arrival. Pre-arrival contact belongs here too, because what the hotel sends and when shapes what the guest replies, and the reply often changes the arrival note; our guide to what to send guests before arrival, and when gives the sequence.

A review of tomorrow's arrival list catches missing guarantees, missing rooming lists and requests the hotel cannot physically keep. The desk should see the original request, not only the confirmed booking, so it understands what the guest actually asked for.

Which daily checks keep the reservations office honest?#

A short fixed list, run at the same time every morning by a named person, prevents most of the problems that would otherwise surface at the desk late at night.

The check works only if it has an owner and a time; a list nobody runs is decoration. Each item produces an action, not a note: extend, confirm, release, chase, merge or escalate. Duplicates and unanswered requests are found by scanning the book, not by waiting for the guest to complain. Yesterday's no-shows must be closed out before the next night audit, or the same room is counted twice in different reports. Log what the check found for a month; the pattern shows whether the problem is volume, staffing or a missing rule.

What to do next#

Start with the record, not the software. Write down two rules this week, the option expiry rule and the guarantee rule, then run the seven-item daily check for a fortnight and log every request that arrived without a timestamp. That log will tell you whether you have a reservations department or a shared inbox, and it gives you the evidence to fix the right one.

If you later want software that enforces these rules rather than merely storing them, AI Otel's hotel operating system is built for exactly this: reservations, groups and room assignment in one system, protected against selling the same room twice. It is built and working, ahead of launch; see https://ai-otel.com/platform/pms, or request a briefing at https://ai-otel.com/contact.