Reza Soleimanipour - Department of Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology
Sarvenaz Jahanian - Department of Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology
Mohsen Varmazyar - Department of Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology

Hotel management is one of the largest business activities across the globe. It is important due to theenormous increase in tourism worldwide during the last decades. One of the most important challengesof hotel management is assigning hotel rooms to booking requests, aiming to maximize the number ofaccepted booking requests as a vital consideration for the hotel’s financial streams. In this manner, thechallenges arise due to unpredictability of human behavior, such that a traveler can cancel their bookingrequest or otherwise, a traveler just show up without a previous reservation, known as walk-in travelers.This paper studies the hotel room assignment problem. First, we proposed a model for the mentionedproblem; then, due to NP-hard of the problem, we provided two heuristic algorithms to maximize thenumber of accepted booking requests. To become more realistic, we consider cancellation and walk-inassumptions in the hotel room assignment problem. Therefore, the first algorithm, deals with the hotelroom assignment with and without cancellation assumption, and the second algorithm, considers thewalk-in assumption as well. To apply the algorithms results, a hotel placed in Lisbon, Portugal, as acase study is under investigation. To better understand the effectiveness of considering the cancellationand walk-in assumptions, the number of accepted booking requests is compared under the mentionedassumptions in our case study hotel.

Hotel management, Cancelation, Walk-in, Overbooking, Room assignment, Heuristicalgorithm