What Are the Allotment Structure Types?

Allotments have different structures to enable you to manage the inventory according to market segments and to organise availability using yield management techniques.

Three types of allotment structure are managed by the system: dedicated, nested and maximum limited.

The system also creates a default allotment called the General Inventory. If you do not set any allotment structures, all the room types of the property belong to the General Inventory.

Dedicated allotments are used to set aside a specific number of rooms for a specific market or to set aside a group of rooms.

Dedicated allotments represent blocked allocations that are often used to reflect pre-sold rooms that are reserved for a group or tour operator, for example.

The rooms that are grouped in a dedicated allotment are reserved until the release dates. The release dates specify when the rooms blocked for the allotment are released for sale in the General Inventory. The release dates are given in number of days prior to check-in. Up to three release dates can be set.

Nested allotments are used to create a hierarchy between allotments.

The highest level in a nested allotment is a dedicated allotment. The allotment is split into hierarchical allotments linked to a specific way of decrementing the inventory when rooms in lower levels are sold.

Typically, low rates, or low yield classes, should book into the lowest nest while high rates, or high yield classes, should book into the highest nest. This enables high revenue customers to have access to the whole inventory (often required in "Last Room Available" terms) and protects low revenue customers against higher level demand until higher revenue allotments are full. This prevents high revenue booking classes from being sold out when lower booking classes are still open.

The higher level of a nested hierarchy is called the parent; the nested allotment is called the child. A parent allotment can only have one nested child. The nested allotment is a sub-set of its parent allotment.

The parent allotment can only be a dedicated allotment or the General Inventory.

Maximum limited allotments are used to constrain a specific type of demand into a limited set of rooms. It is possible to sell rooms in a maximum limited allotment as long as rooms are available in the parent allotment.

The maximum limited allotment is a sub-set of the parent allotment.

The parent allotment can only be a dedicated allotment or the General Inventory.

A default allotment structure rule is created automatically to represent the General Inventory for an open period set by the system range.

The General Inventory is a simple, dedicated structure used as the default allotment for selling all rate plans not mapped to specific allotments. Its capacity is set as the hotel capacity from which the rooms allocated to specific, dedicated allotments have been deducted. The General Inventory does not have any allocated rooms set by default.

The General Inventory is identified by the GINV allotment code.