Modeling a hotel room assignment problem

This article studies hotel room assignment for reservations. We develop a heuristic method to maximize the number of bookings to accommodate. A feasible solution from the heuristic method is fed to an MIP formulation for an expedited solution. Based on numerical tests, our proposed model and algorithm considerably outperform the traditional manual practice for room assignments. The empty nights between two adjacent assignments of the same room, called gaps, cause losses of service capacity. Our model reduces gaps when assigning rooms.