Restricted Inventory

If an out of order block covers more than 20% of your total inventory and lasts more than seven consecutive days, review this topic to ensure G3 RMS can produce the best possible forecasts and decisions.

G3 RMS expects that you place rooms out of order in your Reservation SystemClosed The primary reservation system, like a PMS or CRS, that provides data to G3 RMS. The data from that one system is used by the RMS to forecast, optimize and produce controls. The controls are sent to all selling systems, which for some integrations may exclude the reservation system. when your property has large numbers of rooms unavailable for sale for a longer time. That can be due to room renovations, repairs, or the result of extreme demand disruption.

Note that reservation systems usually have two out of order statuses (names might vary):

Use Out of Order if your property is 100% closed. Also use Out of Order status if your property is partially closed, and you can’t make rooms available, for example due to renovation or maintenance. The below Best Practices apply to when you use Out of Order.

Use Out of Service or similar status if your property is partially closed, but you can make rooms available. For example, you might close floors during a low demand season. But for some high demand dates within the season, you can put some of the floors back into service. If you use Out of Order in this scenario, G3 RMS sees constrained capacity and might react with LRV and pricing that is too aggressive for a low demand period.

Some reservations systems have limited options to place rooms out of order. If needed, use Out of Order Overrides in G3 RMS.

Best Practices

We recommend that you follow these steps:

  1. If the out of order period results in changes to your inventory (new or discontinued room types or Room Classes or a shift in their capacity), note the details of the changes. You'll need to provide this information to IDeaS.
  2. As soon as you know the dates, remove the inventory from sale within the reservation system that provides data to G3 RMS. To achieve that, use out of order or a similar control that reduces the Effective CapacityClosed The hotel's physical capacity minus the out of order rooms. in G3 RMS. Based on the capacity reduction, G3 RMS revises the forecast and decisions for the impacted dates in the next optimization.
  3. When you first enter the out of order block, it will likely trigger a Costly Out-of-Order (OOO) Rooms Exception that you need to resolve.
  4. Decide if you need to enter a Special Event for the impacted period. See the scenarios below.
  5. Until the out of order period is past, perform regular forecast and decision reviews for the impacted period. If necessary, apply overrides to ensure that the system knows what you know. If the out of order status doesn't remove the rooms from sale in your selling systems, apply additional controls in those systems.
  6. If your property is 100% closed, continue to run night audits in your reservation system. Without running night audits (or rolling the business date), G3 RMS doesn't receive daily data and might not be able to optimize or update decisions. If you can't run night audits, inform IDeaS and we stop the daily emails warning that G3 RMS isn't processing. Note that if you don't run night audits, you will not see pace data or Same Time Last Year (STLY) data in reports and dashboards for the impacted period. If the closure is longer than 44 days, check a Comp or House reservations into a physical room for the full duration. With a daily record during the closure, G3 RMS has fewer issues at re-opening.
  7. If you make changes to room types or Room Classes, review the considerations and complete the additional steps in the Room Class setup. Then complete the remaining Rooms Configuration tabs.
  8. Is your out of order period due to a renovation and, as a result, you want to increase pricing? If so, consider how G3 RMS forecasts demand. It uses history to understand the value of demand, so the forecasted ADR may not immediately be as high as you expect it. As a temporary fix, you may need to use pricing overrides or a Competitive Market Position Constraint. Contact your IDeaS representative for questions.
  9. Once the period is in the past, G3 RMS creates an Out of Order Rooms Present in Hotel Data Alert. Resolve it using the appropriate reason, see the following scenarios.
  10. Continue to review forecasts and decisions to ensure that G3 RMS has correctly reacted to the impact of the out of order block. Three to four weeks after the end of the out of order period, the IDeaS support team will do a final investigation, share their observations with you, and close the case.

Scenarios

Here are three scenarios for when you add a Special Event for the restricted period and how you resolve the Out of Order Rooms Present in Hotel Data Alert :

For example, you close every year during a season with very low demand. The patterns and the extend of the closure repeat. It's either all days of the week or, if you only close for some days of the week, it is always the same days of the week.

You want G3 RMS to expect no demand for all affected days of the closure. And you want the system to expect the same for the next closure.

  • Enter a Special Event for past and future closure periods. G3 RMS forecasts the same low or zero demand from the start of the closure to the later parts of the closure. And it forecasts future instances of the closure based on the last instance.
  • For the OOO Alert, select A) Use the data to forecast - Seasonal Out of Order rooms. G3 RMS uses the past data to forecast future Special Event instances.

The closure can be due to a renovation or an extreme demand disruption. You don't want the system to use any data of the closure to forecast future demand.

  1. 100% of the inventory is closed. You want G3 RMS to expect no demand for all impacted days of the closure.
    • You don't need to enter a Special Event. Enter an Information Only event if you want to track it.
    • For the OOO Alert select C) Don't use the data to forecast - Out of Order rooms constrain the performance.
  1. Only parts of your inventory are closed. You want G3 RMS to forecast future days of the closure based on the past days of the closure.
    • Enter a Special Event if you want G3 RMS to copy the demand of past days of the Special Event to the future days of the same instance.
    • After the Special Event ends, resolve the OOO Alert using C) Don't use the data to forecast - Out of Order rooms constrain the performance. If you select the option before the Special Event ends, G3 RMS can't use the data to forecast the remainder of the restricted period. If you don't get this Alert, contact Support to ensure that the period is excluded.

You are open on some days of the week and closed on others. The closure can be due to a renovation or an extreme demand disruption.

  1. You want G3 RMS to forecast future days of the closure based on the past days of the closure. You don't want the system to use any data of the closure to forecast future demand.
    • Enter a Special Event for the period. G3 RMS copies the demand from past days of the Special Event to future days. If you want to take closer control because you think you know what demand to expect, enter multiple instances. For example, four weeks have passed and you expect that the last week, week 4, better represents the demand for the remaining period than the first three weeks. In that case, create one instance for the weeks one to three, one for week four, and one for the remaining weeks. G3 RMS forecasts the next weeks based on the last instance, week four.

      Note: The more you change the instances of the Special Event, the more forecasts might change.
    • After the Special Event ends, resolve the OOO Alert using C) Don't use the data to forecast - Out of Order rooms constrain the performance. If you select the option before the Special Event ends, G3 RMS can't use the data to forecast the remainder of the restricted period. If you don't get this Alert, contact Support to ensure that the period is excluded.
  1. You want G3 RMS to forecast and learn "normally". Forecast demand for the open days of the closure based on past days (of the same day of the week).
    • Don't enter a Special Event for the open days. For closed days of the week you can enter a Special Event, but you don't need to. G3 RMS should set the appropriate controls, as long as rooms are Out of Order.
    • In the OOO Alert for the closed dates select C) Don't use the data to forecast - Out of Order rooms constrain the performance. If you don't get this Alert, contact Support to ensure that the period is excluded.