Room allocation for festivals and retreats: rooms, dorms, tents, vans

Friday, six in the evening. The first cars roll in, and at the door someone asks: "Which room am I in?" You scroll through a group chat with three hundred messages. Two friends asked to share, a flyer wrote that she only sleeps in a women's dorm, a base drove all night in his van and just wants to know where to park.

Accommodation is where an AcroYoga festival or retreat gets personal: people forgive a late lunch, not a bunk next to someone they didn't expect. Below: how to plan rooms with any tool, and how AcroSpot places everyone in minutes and prints the plan for your wall. New to all this? Start with how to organize an AcroYoga event. Looking for training spaces instead? Those are the tracks of your festival timetable.

Why rooms get messy

What you sell (a double room, a dorm bed, a tent pitch) and what exists (Room 4 on the first floor, the big dorm above the hall) are two different lists: the bookings come in on one, the keys hang on the other. Wishes like "put me with Lea" arrive by message, by e-mail, at the bar, and groups grow after booking. And when some come for the week and some for the weekend, one fixed price per bed is unfair to somebody.

How to plan accommodation, with any tool

Sell only what you can really hand out

Decide the kinds before registration opens: whole rooms, dorm beds, tent pitches, van spots, maybe a mattress camp in the gym. For each, note how many people one booking sleeps and how many you have. Don't sell a double room you can't point to on the floor plan.

Ask the right questions at sign-up

Ask who someone comes with, and whether they need a room for women only or men only. Ask once, in one place, not in the chat. If people may sleep at home or with locals, say so: it frees beds for those who travel far.

Build the plan in two steps

First the real units with their places, all empty. Then the people: groups first, the biggest first, then solo travellers into the gaps. Keep a column "not placed yet", so nobody falls through. The result is your rooming list:

• One row per room: name, stay, places, women only, men only or mixed, a note for the team.
• One row per person: stay booked, group, gender if you ask it, room.

How AcroSpot helps

Every kind of bed, priced fairly

Sell beds the way they really exist: rooms, dorm beds, tent pitches, van spots or your own kind, like a hammock spot. Price them per night, so the weekend pass and the week pass each pay their own nights, and include a bed in a ticket or offer it as an upgrade. A stay can be at the venue or somewhere else, like the hostel down the road, and people who arrive earlier or stay longer can book extra nights.

Place everyone in minutes

The room plan is where your stays meet the real rooms. Create the rooms, dorms or pitches of each stay; everyone who booked waits under "Not in a place yet", a travel group as one card. Then one tap places everyone: automatic placing puts each group into one room first, then fills the fullest rooms with solo travellers, where possible next to someone who speaks their language. Everyone just placed is marked, and one undo takes it back.

Want to place someone by hand? Drag a person or a group onto a room: it turns green where they fit, red where they don't.

A printed room plan on the wall

The evening before, print a clean plan for the wall, and arrival day gets quieter at once. A search on top of the room plan answers "which room am I in?" in a second, and if you like, people see who they share with on their own ticket. At the desk, handing over the key is part of the same tap that checks the person in; for those shifts, read organizing helpers at a festival.

Women-only rooms that stay women-only

Each room is mixed, women only or men only. When your registration asks for gender, automatic placing keeps to it. Suggestions point at what needs a look, like an overfull room, someone in a room of the other gender or a split group, each with a fix one tap away.

Wishes and groups collected at sign-up

Participants choose their stay while they register and name the people they come with, so the room wish and the travel group arrive with the booking, not in the chat. You decide whether people may also sleep at home or arrange their own, and whether locals may host other participants, free or at their own price, settled directly between them. If you plan with someone else, read organizing an event with co-organizers.

Checklist

1. Every stay you sell matches real rooms, beds or pitches.
2. Prices that follow the nights when passes differ in length.
3. One question for who comes together, one for women-only or men-only rooms.
4. Rooms created empty, then groups, then solo travellers.
5. Nobody left under "not placed yet".
6. The plan printed and hung up the evening before.

Hang a printed room plan at your next check-in: plan your beds on AcroSpot. Send a short request and we set up your event with you on a call. AcroSpot for organizers