six services
Consultancy, logistics, energy, strategy, product development and guest comfort — every property on the same basis.
Room·BalanceRoom·BalanceIntelligence, logistics and optimisation software
RoomBalance is intelligence, logistics and optimisation software for a hotel business. We read what the operation is actually doing, we plan the work and the supply around it, and for every decision that has a right answer we compute the mathematical optimum, and we do so with precision and care.
We built an engine that can calculate the variables of weather, sunlight, topography and biological clocks, so we could provide an intelligence basis for your business management and planning that encompasses the real variables that affect your business every day.
What we do
Six services, every property on the same basis. We read what the operation is actually doing — your calendar, your building, your book — and then either fit onto the systems you already run or build the piece you are missing. Single property, group or enterprise.
01Consultancy
Every house on the same basis. Each piece of work ends in a number and the dates that produced it.
What each property earned against what it could have earned, every house on the same basis. Ends in a number and the dates that produced it.
Which group business to take at which rate, how far to oversell each date, and what walking a guest actually costs.
Whether the keys you own fit the demand you get — and for a build or a conversion, how many keys and of what type.
What a property you are buying is capable of, against what the seller's book shows.
A worked example
One week of a 300-room property's own calendar. The question an owner asks is whether the rooms were full. The question that pays is whether the bookings you kept on the night you turned people away were the ones worth keeping.
How we get there: we take the week as booked — every stay as an arrival and a departure, every room type, your upgrade rules and your rates — and settle three things. The fewest rooms that could have covered it, which is how oversold you really were and on which night. Whether everyone fits one room each under your own upgrade rules, or exactly where you fall short. And on the night you turned people away, the accept-and-decline list that keeps the most revenue — the one first-come-first-served gets wrong. Each comes back with the proof that no other answer beats it.
A certified answer doesn't expire — calendars do. Every receipt names the exact booking calendar it proves, so staleness is self-evident, and a fresh one is always a file-drop away.
02Logistics
The same arrival and departure pattern that drives the room count drives the labour and the supply. Planned against the real day, not a flat rule that assumes every day is average.
Attendant load, turn times and linen cycles planned against the real arrival and departure pattern instead of a flat rule.
What to buy, what to hold, and what to move between houses.
A worked example
A Tuesday morning at the same 300-room property. Housekeeping is sectioned the way most hotels section it — two floor teams, a suite-trained team, and a few floaters held in reserve. The question was never how many rooms there are. It is who finishes last.
How we get there: we take the morning as it actually is — who is leaving, who is staying, and which rooms each attendant is allowed to enter — and settle on the division of the work in which the attendant who finishes last finishes as early as possible. What comes back is that division, together with the proof that no other division of the same morning beats it.
Which is also how you size a shift before you roster it. Run the same morning with one floater fewer and it cannot finish better than 13 — so the third floater is worth a room off whoever finishes last, and that is a staffing decision with a number attached rather than an argument about it.
A flat quota is wrong in both directions at once: it promises a morning you cannot have, and it hides the three rooms you could have taken off your slowest attendant.
03Energy
Where the sun, the weather, the terrain and the buildings around you stop being background and start being a line on the bill. Every figure is specific to your building, its orientation, and who is inside it.
What each room needs, hour by hour — the sun on its own façade with the neighbouring buildings subtracted, the weather, and who is in it. An empty room is not cooled.
Your bill is charged on the highest load you ever pull, not only on what you use. Pre-cooling is staggered so the house never pulls at once.
Two rooms of the same type are not the same room on a thirty-eight degree afternoon. When both are free, the guest takes the cheaper one to hold.
A worked example
A hotel in Cairo, the fifteenth of July, four in the afternoon. Two standard rooms, same floor, same rate, same furniture. One faces west and one faces east. The rate card says they are the same room. The wall says otherwise.
How we get there: we take the building where it actually stands — its latitude, its elevation, the date, and which way each wall faces — and work out how much sun is landing on that particular wall in that particular hour. Not an average for the city. That wall, that hour, that day.
Three decisions fall out of one afternoon. The west room costs multiples of the east room to hold at temperature, so when both are free the guest goes in the cheaper one and nobody notices anything except the bill. The two walls never peak together — eight hours apart — so pre-cooling them on a single clock makes the whole building pull at once for no reason, and pre-cooling them on the sun's clock means it never does. And the south rooms, which a northern habit says are the hot ones, never get past 297 all day at this latitude in July.
The building does not move and the sun does not improvise: every one of these hours is known for every wall you own, for any date, before it arrives.
04Strategy
The longer horizon, on the same basis as the daily work: expansion, renovation, repositioning and channel policy read as one sequence rather than as separate arguments.
Which property takes the money, in what order, and what each one gives back. Expansion, renovation and repositioning in one sequence.
What your direct business is worth against what an OTA costs you for the same room-night, and which dates you sold too cheaply.
A worked example
A group with a capital programme on the table: refurbishments, a new wing, two repositionings, a spa. Each one takes a hotel out of service for a stretch of months and gives something back once it reopens. You cannot run them all at once, and the argument in the room is never really about which project is good. It is about how many hotels the group can stand to have closed at the same time.
How we get there: each project is a window — the months that hotel is out of service — and a figure for what it gives back once it reopens. You tell us how many hotels the group can stand to have closed at the same time. Back comes the programme that returns the most, the order it runs in, which projects were left out, and the proof that no other programme under the same constraint does better.
The useful part is not the answer. It is the ladder beside it. The second simultaneous closure is worth $4.45M a year and the third is worth $4.42M — so up to three, the appetite costs you nothing to have. The fourth is worth $3.09M. The fifth is worth $1.20M and asks for two more closed hotels to get it. That is the point at which how aggressive to be stops being a matter of temperament.
Change one return, one window, or one contractor's availability, and the whole programme is recomputed before you have finished describing the change.
05Product development
The pieces an operation is usually missing, built and handed over running on your own hardware. Whatever you already have — property management system, channel manager, payments, the book — keeps working the way it works today, and what we build talks to it.
Live availability, a room held while the guest decides, confirmation, and a cancellation link that belongs to them. Double-booking is impossible, not unlikely.
A branded invitation that lands correctly in Apple, Google and Outlook, in the guest's time zone, and keeps itself up to date.
Property management system, channel manager, payments, and reconciliation into a double-entry book kept in exact cents.
If you already price with one, keep it — we do not replace it. Where a house has nothing, we build yours: your rules, your priorities, every property in one view.
A worked example
The spa and the front desk are two departments on two systems. Somebody re-types the day sheet onto the guests' bills, and not all of it survives the trip — some charges never arrive, some arrive at the wrong figure, and some arrive for treatments nobody did.
How we get there: the treatment lands on the guest's bill the moment the therapist closes the ticket, so there is nothing for anyone to re-type at checkout. Then we set the spa's own record beside the folios and compare them ticket by ticket rather than total against total — which is why the answer is eighteen named tickets rather than a $1,978 gap somebody goes hunting for on the last Friday of the month. Every figure that lands on a bill is a whole number of cents with a matching entry somewhere else, so an amount cannot go in on its own and cannot be quietly altered afterwards.
The $2,684 is recoverable, and it is the smaller half. The other half is the guest at the desk with a taxi running, being told the hotel is quite sure.
06Guest comfort
A guest who flew in from eight time zones out is not on your clock yet. The light, the wake-up and the first meal can be planned around the clock they actually arrived with.
What the light should be doing at this hour — colour and intensity, moving with the sun at that latitude and season. Not a fixed list of scenes set at handover.
You know the time zone they flew in from. A plan for their first days: when to take light, when to avoid it, when to eat and when to sleep.
Curtains, wake-up and breakfast on the clock the guest arrived with, not the hour they guessed at when they booked.
A conference lands from one origin and is moved together, so they are awake in the nine o'clock session.
A worked example
A delegation lands from eleven time zones out, the agenda starts at nine, and the conference is over in three days. The hours were chosen from the agenda, not from the delegates.
How we get there: we compute the attendees' own circadian rhythm from the sun at each end, so the eleven hours is the distance between two body clocks rather than a number off a chart. Everything you cater falls out of that — when the room should be dark, when the curtains open, when breakfast is worth serving, which hour of the afternoon the coffee has to be waiting, and how much of the gap they can take off at home before they fly. Tell us where they are flying from and we return their day on your clock.
You cannot fix eleven hours in three days, and the agenda was never yours to move. The room they walk back into is.
Where we sit
Capability facts only — no vendor names, no performance claims about anyone else. Where another category wins, we say so: keep those tools. What none of them do is state the optimum and prove it. Where you have no tool at all, that is the second thing we do: we build it, and it runs on your computers.
| Capability | PMS | Channel managers | Yield systems | Spreadsheets | Consultants | RoomBalance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reservation record | ✓ | — | — | — | — | keep yours |
| Channel distribution | — | ✓ | — | — | — | keep yours |
| Rate setting and forecasting | — | — | ✓ | — | ~ | keep yours |
| Room assignment | ✓ | — | — | ~ | — | ✓ |
| Minimum rooms for the calendar | — | — | — | ~ | ~ | ✓ |
| Maximum revenue when oversold | — | — | — | — | ~ | ✓ |
| Housekeeping and turn planning | ~ | — | — | ~ | ~ | ✓ |
| Procurement and supply | — | — | — | ~ | ~ | ✓ |
| Cooling load, room by room | — | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Peak demand | — | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Asset and capital plan | — | — | — | ~ | ~ | ✓ |
| Direct booking | ~ | ~ | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Folio reconciliation | ~ | — | — | ~ | ~ | ✓ |
| The guest's own clock | — | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Bespoke build, on your computers | — | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
Keep the stack you have. We're the layer it is missing: the one that computes the allocation, proves it optimal, and signs it. A PMS assigns rooms and proves nothing; a yield system forecasts and prices; neither can tell you the fewest rooms that cover your calendar or the most revenue an oversold night can earn. And none of them knows what the sun is doing to the west face of your building at four in the afternoon, what that room costs you to hold at temperature, or what hour the guests landing tonight are still keeping.
Where there is no system to fit onto, that is the other half of the work. The direct booking page that can't double-book. The outlet whose sheet reconciles itself against the folios. The group that plans two years of capital somewhere other than a spreadsheet. We build those, with the whole engine behind them, and they run on your computers — your bookings and your book stay in your building.
A note on the easy case, before you raise it: a handful of bookings on one night you can settle by eye, and we won't pretend otherwise. The work is everything around it — a full calendar, upgrade rules, an oversold night with real rates attached, and a proof attached to each answer.
What your people will ask
What an operator's security and finance people ask before anything goes near a live booking system — answered plainly.
We connect to what you run from the outside, over an API. Your systems keep working the way they work today, nothing you already own gets replaced, and nobody at the property learns a new screen. If you also want the piece you are missing built properly, we build that — an offer, not a condition.
No data is ever stored nor logged by our machines, because they are all stateless. The question you send is computed and the answer is returned; there is no store to breach, because there is no store.
When we build you a bespoke system, it runs on the hotel's own computers. Your bookings, your guests and your book stay in your building — nothing of yours is ever on our servers, under either arrangement.
Same week in, same answer out, on every run. Nothing is sampled and nothing is guessed, so there is never a second version of the number to reconcile.
The proof comes back with the number — the fewest rooms that cover the calendar, the revenue an oversold night left behind, the charges that never reached a bill. Your finance side checks it on your own figures without redoing the work.
A no-show rate or next season's demand cannot be proved. We estimate those from your own history and we label them as estimates — one never arrives dressed as a certified answer, and never shares a reply with one.
If a certified answer ever fails your own check, it is void and we say so in writing. That is the whole arrangement: check our results rather than audit us.
What comes back is a plan and the number behind it. Moving a guest, walking a booking, sending an attendant, switching a chiller on — those stay the property's decision. Software we build acts only where you told it to.
vs alternatives
Start
Begin wherever it costs you most — the revenue you suspect you are leaving on the table, a housekeeping plan that never matches the day, the cooling bill, the direct booking you don't have yet, or a delegation landing eight time zones out. Single property, group or enterprise, and every engagement is by enquiry.
The quickest way in costs nothing, and it needn't be the rooms. Send a week of bookings — arrivals, departures, room types, rates, no guest names and no payment records — and back comes the fewest rooms that cover the week, whether everyone fits under your upgrade rules, and the revenue an oversold night left behind. Or send a month of one outlet's tickets. Or a morning's arrivals with who is on shift. Or an address and a date. Or the list of projects and the months each one closes a hotel. Or simply where a delegation is flying in from. Any of them comes back as a worked answer like the ones above, and nothing you send is kept. Or take a call and we compute one live while you watch.
roombalance@kairoico.com Book a call