Agency allotments

Contract inventory, handled properly. (Covering July 2026.)

Most resorts that work with agencies run allotments on a spreadsheet and a calendar reminder. It works until it doesn't: someone sells a held room, someone forgets the cut-off, and at the end of the season nobody can say what the contract actually produced. Gurita now models the contract itself.

What's new

• Allotment contracts — hold named rooms for an agency over a period, with the contract number, the terms and the agency's email list in one place. Written on the agency page, where the rest of that relationship already lives.
• Held nights are really held — activating a contract blocks its room-nights. They drop out of availability and show on the occupancy timeline labelled with the contract, so nobody sells them by accident.
• Automatic release — rolling ("14 days before each night") or a fixed cut-off date. Unsold nights come back to open inventory on their own, and the agency gets a reminder before it happens plus a digest of what it lost.
• Sell from the contract — the booking wizard offers the contracts covering a stay; if the booking's agency has exactly one, it's picked for you. The occupancy timeline has a Book from … action straight off a held block.
• Add a booking that already exists — a guest who booked direct and is claimed by the agency afterwards, or a contract signed after the first reservations landed. Open the booking, pick the contract, save. No cancel-and-rebook.
• Utilization in five buckets — sold, optioned, remaining, released, and unavailable: the nights you promised but someone took anyway. That last number is the one to watch.
• Night ledger and revenue — every room-night with its state and the booking consuming it, and gross/commission/net for the contract, with cancelled bookings kept out of the total.
• All Allotments — one cross-agency list with a releasing soon filter, so the cut-offs coming up this week are one click away.

Why it matters

An allotment is a promise you make months in advance and then have to keep while a hundred other bookings go through the same rooms. The two ways it usually goes wrong are silent: a held room gets sold to someone else, or a cut-off passes without anyone selling the rooms back.

Gurita closes both. A held night can't be booked without an explicit override, and the override tells you exactly what it costs before you take it — "for anyone else the nights are taken outside it and the contract keeps holding fewer of them than it thinks." The cut-off runs itself.

What that leaves is a number you can act on. At the end of a season each contract can tell you what it held, what it sold, what came back, and what it earned net of commission — which is the conversation you actually want to have when the agency asks for the same allocation next year.

Notes

• Allotments are part of the Agency Sales module (Premium).
• Contracts hold named rooms, not room types, and the hold period is check-out exclusive — a contract running 8 → 12 July holds four nights, not five.
• Reading contracts needs the Allotments permission. Agencies with self-service logins see their own contracts read-only; changes stay with the resort.

Full details in the Allotments chapter.