“You’ve got to be kidding me!” said Amit Chopra, owner of the 215‐room Comfort Express in Jamestown.

“No, I’m not kidding. He sold them all,” replied Sylvia Zepeda, the hotel’s director of sales and marketing.

Together, Amit and Sylvia served as the hotels revenue management team. It was February 6. Sylvia had just informed Amit that Bart Stevens, the hotels’ new night auditor, had, late last night, taken 17 separate reservations. Each reserving guest had purchased nine rooms. Each reservation was for one night, and all were scheduled to arrive on November 22.

Because the buyers had purchased in quantity, Bart had given each caller a 15% room discount; the normal amount permitted by Amit and Sylvia when a reservation agent was quoting rates for a multi‐room sale. Bart had sold every one of the hotel’s remaining 153 rooms that had been available for that date.

“But that’s the weekend of the Annual Hunting and Fishing Show. The city will be packed! We always sell out that weekend. We never sell at discount, and we always require a three‐night minimum stay on each room.”

“I know,” replied Sylvia. “But Bart’s new. He said he didn’t know. No one told him. And we had not inputted the Hunting and Fishing Show information into the PMS yet. It’s still more than six months away. So the machine let him sell all the rooms with no pop‐up warnings!”

1. As a knowledgeable hospitality accountant, why do you think Amit and Sylvia would require a three‐night minimum stay for guests reserving rooms during the Annual Hunting and Fishing Show?

2. Given what you know about hotel room pricing, why would they eliminate discounts on the rooms sold during the weekend of the show?

3. How should Amit and Sylvia ensure that all desk agents, and the night auditors, working at their hotel were aware of all special future sale dates and that their PMS was continually kept up to date?

4. How could they themselves stay abreast of the future dates they should be carefully monitoring?