One rooming list, assembled from every department
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.
Rooming list software collects guest names, assembles a hotel-ready list, and keeps it accurate through the changes that follow. In Blocks, department leads submit names in their own portal, rooms carry up to five occupants, and the list stays tied to the block — so a room moving hotels or a roommate changing is an edit, not a rebuild.
“Every department sends names a different way — some in the email body, some in a spreadsheet, some just texting me.”
Department leads enter names in their own portal — pasted, typed, or uploaded as the spreadsheet they already keep — and Blocks assembles one hotel-ready rooming list from all of them.
“Three of the crew wanted to share a room and my template only has two name columns.”
A room holds up to five guests, capped by what the room type allows. Every occupant carries through to the hotel’s list, the printable version and the audit — and each one gets their own personal link.
“We moved a whole crew to the overflow hotel and I re-typed forty rooms into a new list.”
Move the room instead. Names, roommates, travel details, itineraries, notes and edit history go with it, and once the hotel has been told the move becomes a clean cancellation there and an arrival at the new property.
“The hotel sent the rooming list back with changes buried in it, and I had to eyeball every row against my copy.”
The rooming-list audit reads the hotel’s returned version against yours and hands you a short list of what disagrees. Every correction is proposed — the hotel’s version never silently wins.
How do you collect guest names without chasing every department?
You give each department lead their own portal — a private link, no login, showing only their team’s rooms. They add guests in one table, paste a list, or upload the spreadsheet they already keep in whatever shape it already lives in; Blocks reads every tab, tallies the people and rooms it found, flags a date it filled in or a room type it did not recognise, and the lead reviews all of that before anything is applied. Sub-groups get their own links and their own progress bars, so a lead running six crews is not the bottleneck for all six. On your side you can see which departments have submitted, which rooms are still unnamed, which are held as TBD rooms that are still guaranteed, and how far behind each department is — “18 of 24 names provided” — with a reminder you can send to the ones still owing. When the names are people you have hosted before, you do not retype them: “Add known people” multi-selects a whole crew out of your organization’s directory, complete with the contact details and loyalty numbers already on file. When it fits the event better, you can also give attendees a branded page to book and pay for their own rooms — every booking lands straight on the block, so their names arrive without a lead re-keying them. There is a good deal more to the portal than name collection — allotments carried forward from last year, change requests, an approvals queue — and it has a page of its own.
How many guests can share one room?
Up to five, capped by what the room type itself allows — so a double will not quietly accept four people because somebody typed them in. The first slot is the primary guest and the rest are roommates, and every one of them is a real record rather than a name in a cell: each occupant carries through to the rooming list the hotel works from, to the printable version, and to the audit when the hotel sends its list back. Each also gets their own personal link, so a roommate can fill in their own contact details and travel without going through the person whose name happens to be first. When somebody joins or leaves a shared room after the list has already gone out, that reaches the hotel as a name in the change notice you send, not as a silent difference the property discovers at check-in. Two things stay deliberately narrow. Loyalty numbers are captured for the primary guest only, because that is the account the stay credits. And no guest’s email address or phone number ever reaches a hotel — the rooming list carries names, dates, room types and requests, and nothing that would let a property contact your people directly. Where a shared room is paid for by more than one team, its cost can be split across departments by percentage for reporting; the split never changes who owns the room.
How does the hotel see and return the rooming list?
The hotel gets its own private page — the hotel portal — where it views the rooming list you assembled and returns its confirmed version, complete with confirmation numbers. That keeps the exchange off long email threads and gives both sides one shared reference for the same list. You always know whether you are waiting on the hotel to return the list or whether it has come back for review. If a returned rooming report comes back by email instead, you start the same review straight from the attachment, so every version is worked the same way. Keeping the hotel portal separate from the department portal matters: department leads only ever see their own guests and rooms, while the hotel sees the assembled list it needs to confirm — no one sees more than their part. Nothing goes to a hotel without your click. The send itself is rendered from a frozen snapshot of the list, so an edit somebody commits while the message is going out cannot produce a row that contradicts itself in the file the hotel opens.
What happens when the hotel sends its list back?
The rooming-list audit compares the hotel’s returned version against yours row by row — matched on confirmation number first, guest name and dates where a number is missing — and hands you a short, grouped summary of what disagrees instead of three hundred rows to re-read. It has been taught the things that used to make that summary useless: it works out what a hotel’s own room codes mean from the rest of the same file rather than filing a mismatch on every row, it treats “BRENNAN, TYLER” and “Tyler Brennan” as one person, and it reads a scanned or faxed list without letting an unverified confirmation number decide which guest is which. Every correction it finds is proposed for you to confirm, and the changes-only email back to the hotel goes out on your click — so the hotel’s version never quietly overwrites yours. That is the short version; the audit has a page of its own with the detail.
What if a room needs to move to another hotel?
Move it. From the assignment view you pick the room and the hotel you want it at, and everything attached travels with it: guest names, roommates, travel details, uploaded itineraries, notes and the edit history that says who changed what. Nothing is re-entered, and nothing you fixed by hand gets rebuilt from the names somebody originally submitted. If the hotel has not been told about the room yet, the move is simply a change of block. Once the property has the room, Blocks makes it a cancellation at the old hotel and an arrival at the new one — two coherent stories each hotel can act on, rather than one confusing amendment that leaves both properties guessing. A move can also be asked for in Ask Blocks, which proposes it and waits for you to confirm before anything happens. This matters more than it sounds: shifting a crew to the overflow property is one of the most common late changes in a room block, and it is the one most likely to cost you a rooming list you had already got right.
Can the rooming list carry hotel loyalty numbers?
Yes. Save your company’s loyalty accounts once, give each hotel its usual program, and record each guest’s number as you build the rooming list — the same grid where names and dates go. You do not have to collect the numbers yourself: department leads can enter loyalty numbers in their portal right alongside their guest names, and each guest can add their own on their personal page. When the list goes out, the numbers ride along — on the rooming-list export the hotel works from and on the full event export your finance team keeps — so the hotel credits the right account instead of leaving points on the table. Missing numbers matter as much as recorded ones, so the event’s Budget tab shows at a glance who is on file and who is not, and you chase the gaps before the stay rather than after checkout. Points from a season of room blocks are real money; the rooming list you were building anyway is where they get captured.
Can I keep my rooming-list spreadsheet template?
Yes. Blocks imports the rooming-list spreadsheet you already use and exports CSV everywhere, so your template and your finance team’s format stay intact. There is no format lock-in and no import you have to babysit — a paste or an upload is enough to get names into the list. The difference is what happens after the export: instead of managing name changes, date edits, and version conflicts by hand in that sheet, the collecting, assembling, sending and checking live in Blocks, and the spreadsheet becomes something you produce on demand rather than the system you fight to keep current. Department leads submit through their portal, Blocks builds the hotel-ready list, and the audit checks what comes back — then you export whatever format you need for accounting, the venue, or your own records. You keep the familiar output and drop the manual reconciliation a spreadsheet cannot do for you.
Frequently asked questions
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.
What is rooming list software?
Can department leads submit their own guest names?
How many guests can share one room?
Can I move a room to a different hotel after the list is built?
How do hotel loyalty numbers get onto the rooming list?
What happens when the hotel returns its version of the list?
Do I have to give up my rooming list template?
Have more questions? Check our glossary of terms or get in touch.
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