A room block marks a specific room as out-of-service for a date range — maintenance, deep clean, damage repair, renovation, VIP hold, or anything else that needs the room kept off the booking grid for a finite time. The block automatically expires on its end date, no manual cleanup needed.
This is different from the persistent Room Master → Status: Out of Service flag, which keeps a room offline permanently until you clear it. Use the room-master flag for retired rooms; use a block for date-ranged operational holds.
Before you start
- You need Room Management access.
- The room can't currently have an in-house guest in the range you want to block — check the guest out first (or pick a date after they're expected to leave).
Creating a block
- Open Front Office → Booking Calendar.
- Right-click the vacant cell on the day you want the block to start. The context menu opens.
- Click Block room… — a small dialog opens.
- Adjust the From and To dates (the dialog seeds From with the cell you clicked and a 1-day default range; extend To to cover the whole block).
- Pick a Reason from the chips: Maintenance · Cleaning · Damage · Renovation · Inspection · VIP-hold · Other. Picking Other opens a free-text field so you can describe the reason in your own words.
- (Optional) Add a Note with extra context — e.g. "plumber due 9am". The note is visible on the calendar's hover popover and on the printed shift-handover.
- Click Block Room.
The blocked range paints grey on the calendar immediately. Any operator trying to create a new booking that overlaps the range gets a clear error message naming the reason.
What a block does and doesn't do
A block:
- Paints the cells grey (OOS) on the Booking Calendar.
- Rejects new bookings that overlap. The save fails with "Room is blocked — Maintenance." (or whatever reason you picked).
- Survives operator restarts and tenants — it's a real DB row, not in-memory state.
- Auto-expires the moment its To date passes. No clean-up needed.
A block does NOT:
- Displace an in-house guest already in the room. If a guest is there, the block can't be created — check them out first or shorten the range.
- Cancel existing advance bookings that overlap. Operators are expected to manually move those bookings (the block is a signal to the operator that something needs reassigning).
Ending a block early
If the work finishes early (or you blocked the wrong dates):
- Right-click any cell in the blocked range on the calendar.
- Click End block (Maintenance) — the reason appears in the button label so you can confirm it's the right block.
- Confirm the prompt. The block is soft-deleted (kept for audit, not reusable) and the cells go vacant from now on.
Tips
- Blocking ahead is fine. You can block a room for next month's maintenance window. The block sits dormant until its From date.
- Multiple blocks on the same room are allowed, as long as their ranges don't overlap. So you can pre-stage a Cleaning block right after a Maintenance one with no gap.
- Hover the block on the calendar to see the reason + note + the range in the popover.
- Block ranges show on the CSV export of the calendar window — useful for handing the engineering team a clean weekly maintenance list.
Common problems
- "An in-house guest already occupies this room in the requested range" → the room is occupied during one of the days you picked. Either check the guest out first OR shorten the range so it starts AFTER they leave.
- "This room is already blocked in the requested range" → an earlier block already covers some of these days. End the existing block (or shorten the new one) and try again.
- End block doesn't appear in the menu → you right-clicked a room whose OOS status comes from the Room Master flag, not from a date- ranged block. Clear the flag from Front Office → Rooms instead.
- A booking can't be saved that overlaps a future block → that's the block doing its job. Either change the booking dates or end the block early.