Release period: when rooms held for an agent or a group come back to you
The release period is the number of days before arrival by which a travel agent, tour operator or group must book the rooms you are holding for it. On that day, the release date or cut-off date, any rooms still without a guest's name come back to you, to sell to anyone. It works for both sides: the agent keeps rooms held until close to the date, and you get back the ones it can't fill while there is still time to sell them.
Also called: release date, release days, cut-off date, cutoff date, allotment release, room block release.
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What the release period is
When you hold rooms for someone else, an allotment for a tour operator or a block for a wedding or a conference, the contract says how long you hold them. The release period counts back from each night: with a 14-day release, the rooms for 20 March must be booked by name by 6 March.
Hotels and agents have several names for the same day: release date, release days, cut-off date. For a group's block, cut-off date is the usual term; for an agent's allotment, release period.
What happens on the release date
- Rooms booked by name before the date stay the agent's or the group's, under the contract's cancellation terms from then on.
- Rooms not booked come back to you. Hotel software can do this on its own: the help for SIHOT, a property management system, says that once an allotment's release period is reached, the allotment is cut to the bookings confirmed that day and the unbooked rooms return to sale.
- Bookings that arrive after the date are yours to accept or not, by what you have left and at the price you choose, as the model allotment contract of the IH&RA and UFTAA code of practice puts it.
- Names on the rooming list can change only before the release date, under the same model contract.
How long a release period should be
There is no one length. It is agreed in each contract, and many contracts set a different one for each season. Two published rules give a sense of it:
The notice a tour operator gives a hotel in Greece to cancel some or all of its reservations without compensation, under the Greek tourism regulation an International Bar Association paper describes. The two sides may agree a shorter or a longer period.
The IH&RA and UFTAA code of practice's rule for a group booked through a travel agent, when the contract says nothing else: the whole group may be cancelled without charge up to 30 days before arrival, up to half of it at least 21 days before, and up to a quarter at least 14 days before. The code is written for hotels and agents in different countries.
Set yours by how quickly you can sell a room that comes back. In a town where rooms sell in the last week, a short release does little harm. Before a festival, a wedding season or a fair, when your own guests book weeks ahead, a long release brings rooms back while those guests are still looking.
Release period, cancellation policy and attrition
Three different rules decide what happens to rooms held for someone else, and a contract needs all three:
- The release period: rooms not yet booked come back to you, free of charge, by a date.
- The cancellation policy: rooms already booked by name can be cancelled until a date, after which a fee is owed.
- Attrition: for a group's block, how far the rooms booked may fall below the rooms contracted before the group pays for the gap. Marriott Bonvoy Events calls it the difference between the room nights contracted and those actually booked.
They work together. A wedding block might release unbooked rooms 30 days before the wedding, let the family cancel named rooms free until 14 days before, and charge for any fall below an agreed share of the block.
A worked example: a 21-day release before Diwali
A 40-room hotel in Jaipur holds 8 rooms a night for a tour operator with a 21-day release, and expects to sell out the four nights around Diwali at ₹9,000. On the release date for those nights, the operator has booked 3 of its 8 rooms. The 5 that come back on each of the four nights are 20 room nights the hotel can still sell three weeks ahead: at ₹9,000, ₹1.8 lakh. With a 3-day release they would have come back when most guests had already booked elsewhere, and the hotel might have sold only a few of them, at a lower price.
What to do about it
- Write the release period into every allotment and group contract, season by season, and for a group the date it falls on.
- Put each release date in your calendar and your property management system, so rooms come back on the day and don't sit held for nobody.
- A week before each release date, ask the agent or the organiser for names. A rooming list due after the release date is too late.
- Set a longer release on your busiest nights, so unbooked rooms come back while you can still sell them at full price.
- When rooms come back, open them on your website and the booking sites at that night's price, not the agent's rate.
Sources
- International Bar Association: the Covid-19 pandemic and hotel contracts in Greece, 8 June 2021, read
- IH&RA and UFTAA: Code of Practice on the relations between hoteliers and travel agents (1999), read
- SIHOT help: Release allotment, read
- Marriott Bonvoy Events: What does BEO stand for? And other meeting planning terms, read
