How to assign Hotel Rooms When Your Computers "Go Down"

I spent the weekend in Hinckley, Minnesota for my cousins wedding at the Grand Casino Hinckley.  The only problem we had the whole weekend was when we arrived.  We were told that the computers were down.  We were also told that we had requested two rooms, one non smoking room with a king bed and a smoking room with a king bed.  This was not the case because my brother and I were not going to be staying in a smoking room (we don't smoke) and with a king bed.  However, we were told that they had printed out the next 5 days of reservations.  I never really understood what was going on with their system but I eventually figured out the information that they did have.  They were trying to do all of this with paper and it was a huge failure.

A very simple spreadsheet could have solved the whole situation.  I created this spreadsheet below in about 10 minutes.  The data that the hotel had was a list of their reservations.  I also assumed that they have a list of all of the rooms in their hotel as well as the room type (smoking or nonsmoking).  If this information was dumped into my spreadsheet they could have easily assigned everybody that came to check in. Check out time was at 11am and check in time began at 4pm.  As a room was cleaned and available the housekeeping staff would indicate that the room was clean on the housekeeping tab.  All reservations and available rooms would appear on the main tab where the reservations could be assigned and guests checked in.



Feel free to make your own copy and see how it works.

It has since dawned on me that their computer systems going down must have been planned.  Why else would they have printed out the next 5 days of reservations?  There was clearly no disaster plan or even just a plan for an outage, albeit planned, like this.  For a large hotel/casino there should have been a system in place even if it was my measly little Google Spreadsheet.

Note: The point here was to show how quick something could have been created.  I understand that steps could be taken to improve the system with open ended ranges...

Also, when they said that they computer systems were down, they were only talking about their assignment and reservations system.  Their internet was working just fine.