Tactical-level resource allocation procedure for the hotel industry /
This dissertation develops new techniques for obtaining strategies to allocate rooms to customers belonging to various market segments, considering time-dependent demand forecasts and a fixed hotel capacity. Unlike techniques developed in the past, these new techniques explicitly account for group a...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Thesis Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
[Place of publication not identified] :
[publisher not identified] ;
1998.
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://proxy.library.tamu.edu/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=732838191&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=2945&RQT=309&VName=PQD |
| Summary: | This dissertation develops new techniques for obtaining strategies to allocate rooms to customers belonging to various market segments, considering time-dependent demand forecasts and a fixed hotel capacity. Unlike techniques developed in the past, these new techniques explicitly account for group and multi-night reservation requests in an efficient and elective manner. This is accomplished by combining an optimal discrete-dynamic model for handling single-night reservation requests with an efficient heuristic, based on a static integer programming model, developed to handle multi-night reservation requests. Three advanced heuristics are proposed to test the performance against the base line heuristic that accepts all reservations as long as rooms are available within the requested room type. These three heuristics differ in their allocation strategies to handle single-night reservation requests. The first heuristic optimally allocates single-night single-room reservation requests. The second heuristic optimally allocates single-night group reservation requests. The third heuristic combines the second heuristic with a downgrading feature. The major obstacle of this dissertation was to make room allocation decisions as efficiently as possible so that real-time decisions could be made. This task was accomplished by formulating a static integer programming-based heuristic that handles multi-night reservation requests as a transportation problem. Hence, any efficient linear programming algorithm can be used to obtain integer solutions within a matter of seconds. In order to investigate the effects of the proposed heuristics under different sets of parameters, two scenarios that differ by the number of room types, maximum number of group requests allowed, and maximum number of multi-night stays allowed are used. The proposed heuristics performed relatively well compared to the statistical estimate of the upper bound value and to the base line heuristic that accepts every reservation request as long as rooms are available. In particular, compared to the base line heuristic, as much as 17% increase in revenue was achieved by the proposed heuristics. |
|---|---|
| Item Description: | Vita. "Major Subject: Idustrial Engineering". |
| Physical Description: | x, 71 leaves : illustrations ; 28 cm. Issued also on microfiche from University Microfilm Inc. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references: pages 62-64. |