Need help with an explanation and understanding of:

The manager of a large downtown hotel has to decide whether to accept 60 additional reservations or not.

If she accepts, she will be overbooked and face certain costs if all the people holding reservations show up.

The manager must forecast, based on historical data, how many of the people holding reservations will show up and then decide, after taking into account the cost involved, whether to take the additional bookings.

This is related to seasonality and exponential smoothing in time-series forecasting.

I would like to see it in excel for an explanation to fully understand it.

MARRIOTT ROOMS FORECASTING "A hotel room is aperishable good. If it is vacant for one night, the revenue is lost forever.\" Linda Snow was commenting on the issue of capacity utilization in the hotel business. "On the other hand, the customer is king with us. We go to great pains to avoid telling a customer with a reservation at the front desk that we don't have a room for him in the hotel." As reservation manager of one of Marriott's hotels, Snow faced this tradeoff constantly. To complicate the matter, customers often booked reservations and then failed in show, or cancelled reservations just before their expected arrival. In addition, some guests stayed over in the hotel extra days beyond their original reservation and others checked out early. A key aspect of dealing with the capacityemanagement problem was having a good forecast ofhow many rooms would be needed on any future date. It was Snow's responsibility to prepare a forecast on Tuesday aftemoon of the number ofrooms that would be occupied each day of the next week (Saturday through Friday). This forecast was used by almost every department within the hotel for avariety of purposes; now she needed the forecast for a decision in her own department Hamilton Hotel The Hamilton Hotel was a large downtown business hotel with 1,877 rooms and abundant meeting space for groups and conventions. It had been built and was operated by Marriott Hotels, a company that operated more than 180 hotels and resorts worldwide and was expanding rapidly into other lodgingemarket segments. Management at the Hamilton reported regularly to Marriott Corporation on both occupancy and revenue performance