Pickup by week
1,170 nights openPeak week is Wk 3 at 63% capacity
ContractedPickup
For film & entertainment productionCrew housing,
Crew housing,
minus the scramble
Location shoots mean crew, cast, and extras across multiple hotels — with unit moves, extensions, and roster changes that never stop. Blocks manages the hotel coordination so your production team can keep shooting.
The schedule changes. The crew list changes. The hotels stay the same problem.
Production timelines shift constantly. Hotel bookings have to keep up — without anyone missing a call time because their room fell through.
"The unit moved three days early and we had 40 crew rooms booked at the wrong hotel for the rest of the shoot."
Move the rooms to the new hotel from one capacity view — names, roommates, travel details, itineraries, notes, and edit history travel with them, and exposure recalculates at both properties. Once the old hotel has been told, the move reads as a cancellation there and an arrival at the new one: two clean stories, nothing re-entered.
"Cast extensions come in at 6pm and I need to add rooms, update rate terms, and coordinate with the hotel before they're on set tomorrow."
Ask Blocks to move the dates; it proposes the change and you confirm. The hotel gets a written change notice you send from the queue — this reservation, this field, this new value.
"Crew stays 28 nights, cast stays 14, and extras stay 3 — all at different rates, all tracked manually in a deck."
Blocks tracks variable stays natively — rates, nights, and guest types stay organized per person, per property, per date. Not everyone is in a hotel, either: a property on the event can be a rental, and someone who needs flights or ground transport but no room sits on a travel-only line, so pickup still reads against the hotels alone.
"The studio just asked me for a housing cost breakdown by department, and I'm going to spend the weekend building it."
Blocks pulls housing spend by production, hotel, and department automatically. Studio reports take minutes, not weekends.
Built for productions where plans change daily
Flex without the chaos — your housing stays current with the schedule, not the other way around.
Dynamic stays
Extend a reservation, move a unit to a new hotel, or swap cast rooms — Blocks proposes the update and recalculates the impact, and you confirm before it's applied. A room that moves takes its names, roommates, and travel details with it, and the hotel's change notice waits in the queue for you to send.
Crew travel on the reservation
When you collect travel for a shoot, each crew member carries their own flights, ground transport, and per-diem dates next to the room — two people sharing a room can differ on all of it. Paste or upload an itinerary and Blocks reads the flights back leg by leg; nothing lands until someone confirms it.
Contract terms at your fingertips
Upload a hotel agreement and Blocks extracts rates, attrition, and every negotiated concession — so you never argue with a hotel about what was agreed.
Illustrative example
Housing that tracks the schedule
Crew, cast, and extras across the location — mixed length-of-stay, unit moves, and every cutoff tracked as dates shift.
Ironwood — Unit Housing
Illustrative eventLive plan
Pickup56%1,470 / 2,640 nights
Attrition exposure$148kIllustrative · 4 hotels
Next deadline8 daysCutoff · Camden House
Next cutoff
8 daysCamden House · Mar 20
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 →Hotel conversations
Blocks keeps every hotel conversation visible per event and hotel — what you sent, what you’re waiting on, what came back — and flags a thread that’s gone quiet as overdue.
Learn more →Key terms
Read the guide
How to Build — and Audit — a Hotel Rooming List →Film & entertainment questions
How Blocks manages crew housing across location shoots and shifting schedules.
How does Blocks handle crew housing when the shoot schedule keeps changing?
When a unit moves or dates shift, ask Blocks to make the change and it proposes the update — moving rooms to a new hotel, extending a stay — recalculates attrition exposure at both properties, and drafts a note to the hotel for you to review. Nothing changes on your reservations until you confirm it. Because Blocks tracks room nights per person and per date, a three-day-early unit move does not quietly leave forty crew rooms booked at the wrong hotel — the exposure and the cutoffs update with the schedule, so housing keeps pace with the shoot instead of falling a week behind it.
Can Blocks track long crew stays of different lengths?
Yes — Blocks measures everything in room nights per person and per date, so mixed lengths of stay are native. Crew booked for 28 nights, cast for 14, and extras for 3 each track separately, at their own rates, per property, per night, instead of being flattened into a single room count. That per-night detail is what keeps budgets (nights times rate) and attrition (unused nights) accurate on a long location shoot. When someone extends, the added nights flow into the same per-night picture, and the housing spend by production, hotel, and department stays current for the studio report.
How do the production office and departments share housing coordination?
The production office keeps the full picture — every hotel, every unit, every cutoff — while each department head works in their own request portal, a private link with no login, to submit their people and guest names. Camera, grip, and hair-and-makeup each manage just their own crew; the office watches names come in per department and sends a guest-name reminder, Blocks-branded, to anyone behind. A lead can add rooms in a table, paste a list, or upload the spreadsheet their department already keeps in whatever shape it lives in — Blocks reads every tab, tallies the people and rooms, flags any date it filled in or room type it did not recognize, and the lead reviews before it applies. Because most productions hire the same crew again, everyone you have hosted before is already in your People directory: search a name rather than retyping it, and "Add known people" pulls a whole department onto the request at once. Either way the names roll straight into the hotel-ready rooming list, so the office is not re-keying a dozen department spreadsheets the night before a cutoff.
Can Blocks keep up with last-minute room changes on a fast turnaround?
Yes. When a cast extension lands at 6pm and the actor is on set tomorrow, ask Blocks to extend the stay — it proposes the change to the block, flags any rate change or concession from the contract, and drafts the hotel note for you to review, all before you confirm. Every negotiated term from the signed agreement is already extracted and at your fingertips, so you are never arguing with a hotel about what was agreed at 6pm. You confirm the change; nothing is applied to your reservations automatically.
How does Blocks keep an unannounced production's details private?
Access is scoped so no one sees more than their part of the shoot. Each department head works only in their own request portal — a private link, no login — and does not see other departments' rosters or the full production. The hotel sees only its own rooming list, through the hotel's private page, and only after you send it. Coordinators and the production office see the full operation; department leads and hotels see just their slice. Requests through the department portal are field-minimized, so a private link exposes what that lead needs to submit and nothing more.
Can Blocks track crew travel and per diem with housing?
Yes — on the same reservation as the room, once you turn travel collection on for the shoot; every travel field is off until you do. Each crew member then carries their own flights and times, ground transport, contact number, ticket cost, and per-diem dates, held per person rather than per room. Forwarded a long itinerary? Paste or upload it and Blocks extracts the flights for you to confirm one by one — no re-typing, and nothing lands until you confirm. Crew members can also submit their own travel on their personal page. When production wants the full picture, travel rides along in the event export, per-diem dates included, so the studio report comes out of the same system as the housing.
Have more questions? Check our glossary of terms or get in touch.