What an allotment is
An allotment is a promise: these rooms, these nights, held for this agency, until this date. Gurita turns that promise into blocks on your inventory, so the rooms stop being freely sellable the moment the contract goes live.
Room-nights, not rooms
A contract holds room-nights — one specific room on one specific night. Two rooms held from 8 July to 12 July is twenty room-nights, and every count in this chapter (utilization, the night ledger, the release digest) is expressed in them.
The hold period is check-out exclusive: a contract running 8 July → 12 July holds the nights of the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th. The night of the 12th belongs to whoever books next, because that is the day the guest leaves.
Note: This is the same convention the booking dates use, so a contract and a stay with identical dates line up exactly.
The five statuses
Allotment status chips
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | Written but not live. Nothing is held; the rooms are still freely sellable. Drafts are the only status you can edit. |
| Active | Live. The unsold room-nights are held and blocked against everyone else. |
| Released | The cut-off has passed (or someone released it by hand). Unsold nights are back in open inventory; bookings already made stay linked. |
| Cancelled | Ended early. All holds are removed and the rooms are freely sellable again. |
| Expired | The hold period is simply over. |
Only a draft can be edited. Once a contract is active it changes through the lifecycle actions — activate, release, cancel — never by editing the dates or rooms underneath bookings that already rely on them.
One contract per room-night
Two active contracts cannot hold the same room on the same night. Gurita refuses the second one with "Contract overlaps with an existing active allotment on the same room-night".
Drafts are exempt: you can write next season's contract over this season's while the current one is still running, and it only has to be conflict-free at the moment you activate it.
What "held" actually does
A held room-night behaves like a block: it disappears from availability, it shows on the occupancy timeline as an Allotment block labelled with the contract, and any attempt to book it is refused with a message naming the contract and the date it frees up.
Two groups can get past that block:
- The contract's own agency, whose booking then consumes the allotment — the sale counts against the contract.
- Staff with an override, who can take the night anyway. See Selling from an allotment.
Nobody gets past it by accident.
Who can access this: requires the Allotments (read) permission. Visible when the Agency Sales module is active.