Pickup by night
1,370 nights openPeak night is Sep 19 at 65% capacity
ContractedPickup
For festivals & touring productionsCrew housing and hotel logistics
Crew housing and hotel logistics
for festivals and tours
A festival build staffs in waves and a tour is the same party in forty cities. Either way the housing is hotels, rentals, and people who need a flight but no bed. Blocks holds all of it as room nights per person, per date.
Eight hotels, a handful of rentals, and a head count that moves every week
Nobody hands you a finished roster. Departments hand you fragments, at different times, in whatever shape their own spreadsheet already has.
"Half the crew is in Airbnbs, so my pickup number is nonsense and I can't tell which hotel is actually behind."
Mark each property Hotel, Rental, or No lodging. Pickup and rooming readiness then quote hotels only, so a build that is half Airbnbs stops dragging down the number you are actually judged on. Rental nights still show, on their own line — nothing is hidden, it is just counted where it belongs.
"Fourteen department leads email me their rooms in fourteen formats, and I re-type all of it."
Give each lead a private link instead. They add rooms in a table, paste a list, or upload the sheet they already keep — Blocks reads every tab, tallies people and rooms, and flags a date it filled in or a room type it didn't recognize before the lead applies it.
"Production asked for twenty more rooms than last year and I found out after the block was gone."
Set what a department gets to draw from and their portal says so before they save: "2 nights more than allotted — this will need your coordinator's approval." The ask lands in your Approvals queue with the reason, the diff, and its cost in room nights.
"Every year I rebuild last year's housing sheet from scratch, and every year I forget somebody."
Upload last year's list, tick one box, give one anchor date, and every stay shifts onto this year's. It creates requests carrying last year's stay as their allotment, plus draft contracts — never live blocks, never guests. A durable Undo removes only what nobody has touched.
Built for a build, not a conference
Crews arrive in waves, split across properties, and change shape until load-in. The plan has to take that without being rebuilt.
Every department, its own page
When you turn department portals on for an event, each lead gets a private link — no login — holding their rooms, the names they still owe, and a progress bar. Sub-groups get their own. Cap a department's rooms and give them a "Request more rooms" button instead of a phone call.
Hotels, rentals, and travel-only
A property is a hotel, a rental, or no lodging at all — for the temp who needs a flight and a ride but not a bed. What only makes sense for a hotel switches off with one plain sentence, so nothing raises a cut-off alert against somebody's house.
Travel that sits on the person
When you collect travel, each crew member carries their own status, title, supervisor, airfare and ground transport — two people in one room can differ on all five. Write their arrival instructions and ride code once and both appear on that person's own page.
Illustrative example
A three-day build across one city
Eight contracted hotels, tracked night by night. The same event also runs short-term rentals and a travel-only roster — deliberately outside these numbers, because pickup counts hotels only.
Harborlight Festival 2026
Illustrative eventLive plan
Pickup60%2,070 / 3,440 nights
Attrition exposure$186kIllustrative · 8 hotels
Next deadline8 daysCutoff · Harbor Court
Next cutoff
8 daysHarbor Court · Aug 21
Go deeper
How Blocks handles the jobs this work depends on — plus the terms and guides behind them.
Staff travel
When you collect travel for an event, each person carries their own employment status, position, on-site supervisor, airfare and ground transport — alongside their flights, their arrival instructions and their ride code. Two people in one room can differ on every one of them.
Learn more →Rooming lists
Department leads submit their guests in their own portal, Blocks assembles a single hotel-ready rooming list — up to five guests to a room, loyalty numbers included — and keeps it current when a room moves hotels or a roommate changes.
Learn more →Pickup tracking
Blocks tracks blocked, assigned, picked-up, and pending room nights for every date and hotel, flags where pickup is drifting from your block, and turns any view into a report you can export.
Learn more →Read the guide
How to Build — and Audit — a Hotel Rooming List →Festival & tour questions
How Blocks handles crew housing when the roster arrives in pieces and half of it is not in a hotel.
How do we house a festival crew across hotels and short-term rentals?
Every property on the event is typed Hotel, Rental, or No lodging, so the numbers stop lying. Pickup and rooming readiness are quoted over hotels only, because a block of Airbnbs has no hotel to confirm anything and averaging it in understates every property you did contract. Rentals still carry their own room nights on their own line, and the things that only make sense for a hotel switch off with one plain sentence: no rooming-list send, no cut-off deadline, no rate check against an address that is somebody's house. A crew member staying in a rental sees its real name and address on their own page, because they have to find it.
Can each department book its own crew rooms?
Yes — when you turn department portals on for an event, each lead gets a private link, no login, to one page holding every room their crew has requested and every name still owed. They add rooms in a table, paste a list, or upload the spreadsheet they already keep, and Blocks reads it, tallies people and rooms, and flags any date it filled in or a room type it did not recognize before the lead applies it. Sub-groups get their own links and their own progress. You can cap a department's rooms and give them a "Request more rooms" button instead of a phone call.
How do we build this year's festival from last year's list?
Upload last year's spreadsheet, tick "This is last year's list — build this year from it", and give one anchor date. Every stay shifts by the same delta onto this year's dates. It creates room requests and draft hotel contracts — never live blocks, never guests — and each request carries last year's stay as its allotment, so a department lead opening their portal sees "last year your team had 12 rooms" rather than an empty table. If it goes wrong, a durable Undo on the event's Settings tab removes only what nobody has touched since.
Can Blocks track crew flights, rides, and arrival details with the rooms?
Yes, when you collect travel on the event. Five details sit on each person rather than on the room — employment status, position, on-site supervisor, whether you are flying them, and how they get around — so two people sharing a king can be a full-time employee and a vendor who drives their own car. Slots after the first get a "Same as" button that copies the first person's answers where a lead can still edit them; nothing is copied silently, and a blank means nobody has said yet. You can write arrival instructions and a ride code per person, and both appear read-only on that crew member's own page under "Getting there", with the code behind a Copy button.
How do we split one hotel between departments, artists, and vendors?
A single hotel block divides into sub-blocks — production, artist party, vendors, volunteers, sponsors — each tracked on its own while still rolling up to the property's total. Blocks tracks blocked, assigned, picked-up, and pending room nights per night for every sub-block, so an over-committed production block is visible while a sponsor block sits half empty. On a citywide build the same view spans every property at once. Each group's lead works only in their own portal and never sees another group's roster.
What happens when a tour moves from city to city?
Each city is its own event, and a run of them is grouped as a series so you can compare hotel performance date by date instead of reopening forty spreadsheets. The hotels you have used before are already in your directory with the sales manager's name and email attached, so the property remembers you even when the coordinator who booked it has moved on. The crew is remembered too — search people you have hosted before instead of retyping a party of eighty, and add a whole group at once.
Have more questions? Check our glossary of terms or get in touch.