Hotel rooming list change log
Your rooming list says who is in which room tonight. It cannot say what you asked the hotel to change last Tuesday, or whether they ever did it. This is the file that does: one row per requested change, ten columns, a worked example to copy. Free, no email.
Opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers and LibreOffice.
What the rows look like
Two batches against one hotel: a date change and a roommate swap sent together on the 19th, then an addition and a cancellation sent on the 26th. The first two rows share an update reference because they are one email about one reservation.
| Update Reference | Action | Guest | Confirmation Number | Field Changed | Previous Value | Requested Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UPD-014 | Change | Priya Nadar | MDT-10412 | Arrival | 2027-03-04 | 2027-03-03 |
| UPD-014 | Change | Priya Nadar | MDT-10412 | Guest 2 name | Jonathan Reyes | Dana Whitfield |
| UPD-015 | Add | Rosa Delgado | — | New reservation | — | 2027-03-05 to 2027-03-08, King, Lighting |
| UPD-015 | Cancel | Alex Moreau | MDT-10417 | Reservation | 2027-03-05 to 2027-03-08, King | — |
Seven of the ten columns shown. Sent, Hotel Response and Notes are cut here for width — they are the three that turn a list of edits into something you can chase.
Five habits that make a change log worth keeping
- 1
One row per requested change
A reservation that moves its arrival and swaps a roommate is two rows, not one row describing both. Give them the same update reference so they stay together as one batch. The hotel can then act on each line without reading a paragraph, and you can mark each one off as it comes back rather than half-closing a row.
- 2
Keep the submitted list, and never edit it
A change log only means something next to the file you originally sent. Save that submission untouched — its own file, dated — and let the log carry everything that happened afterwards. A working copy you keep editing in place cannot tell you what the hotel was ever told, which is the one question the week of the event turns on.
- 3
Date every batch
Fill in Sent when the email goes, in one timezone you state once. Batches are how a hotel works through changes and how you chase them, so a row without a date cannot be chased and cannot be discussed. It matters most around the cutoff, where the difference between the 19th and the 21st is the difference between a change and a favour.
- 4
Requested is not confirmed
A change is live when the hotel says it is, not when you send it. Leave Hotel Response as awaiting, move it to acknowledged when a person replies, and only to confirmed once you have seen the change in what the hotel sent back. Everything still awaiting is a room standing the way it was, and that is the list worth reading before you travel.
- 5
An absence is not a cancellation
A name missing from your next file has not been cancelled. Nobody at the hotel is comparing two spreadsheets to work out what you left out, and a room you stopped listing is still a room you are contracted to pay for. Cancel each one on its own row, in writing, and log the date you sent it.
Send it the way the hotel asked for it
Some properties want a changes-only list; others want a complete replacement file with the changes marked, and a few want both — the marked-up file, and a short summary of what moved. Follow the process in your contract or the one your contact asked for. The log is yours either way: it is the record of what you sent, whatever shape the file took.
Every column, and what goes in it
Ten columns, in the order a row gets written: what the change is, what it moves from and to, when it went and what came back.
What changed
- Update Reference
- One reference per batch you send, not per row. Several rows share it: a reservation that moves its arrival and swaps a roommate in the same email is two rows under one reference, so "the change we sent on the 19th" has exactly one answer. Any scheme works — UPD-014, 2027-02-19-A — as long as a reference is never reused.
- Action
- What you are asking the hotel to do. A substitution is a Change, not a Cancel followed by an Add — cancelling and rebooking can lose the rate, the room type and the room’s place in the block.Allowed values: Add, Change, Cancel.
- Guest
- The lead guest on the reservation, so the hotel can find the row. When the change is to a roommate, the lead guest still goes here and the occupant being swapped goes in the previous and requested columns.
- Confirmation Number
- The hotel’s reference for the reservation. Blank on an addition — the number comes back from the hotel — and it is what both sides should match on, because two guests can share a name and one guest can be spelled two ways.
- Field Changed
- Which field moves: Arrival, Departure, Room type, Guest 2 name. One field per row. A row that says "various" is a row nobody can check off.
From what, to what
- Previous Value
- What the hotel is currently holding — the value from the list you submitted, not from your working copy. This is the half of the row that lets the hotel confirm they are changing the thing you think they are.
- Requested Value
- What you are asking for. On an addition, the whole reservation: dates, room type, and the team it belongs to. On a cancellation, blank.
When, and what came back
- Sent
- The date and time the batch went to the hotel, in one timezone you state once and never vary. A change you cannot date is a change you cannot discuss later, and the dates that matter most sit either side of a cutoff.
- Hotel Response
- Requested is not confirmed. "acknowledged" means a person replied; "confirmed" means you have seen the change in what the hotel sent back. Until then the reservation still stands the way it was, and planning against the requested value is planning against something nobody has agreed to.Allowed values: awaiting, acknowledged, confirmed, declined.
- Notes
- Why, plus anything the hotel needs in order to say yes: the flight that moved, the room already held as TBD, the cutoff you are inside of. It is also what you read in June when someone asks why the count changed in February.
A change log is what you sent. An audit is what came back.
These are two halves of the same round trip, and they are not interchangeable. The log is yours — you write a row every time you ask the hotel for something, and it is the only place the date you asked survives. The other half is the file the hotel sends back after re-keying your names into its own system, where an arrival moves by a night, a first name shortens, and a room you submitted quietly has no record. Nothing in your log will tell you about any of that, because nobody asked for it.
For that second job, thefree rooming list auditcompares the list you sent with the hotel’s returned file, in your browser, and lists what differs. Use it for exactly that. It is not a way to compare two versions of your own list: it is built to read the second file as the hotel’s answer, so every finding it writes reads as a statement about the hotel, and feeding it last week’s copy of your own spreadsheet would produce a page of statements nobody at the property ever made. To compare two of your own versions, the method is incomparing hotel rooming lists— sort both by confirmation number, match on it before you match on names, and write the differences into the log as rows.
When the spreadsheet stops being enough
The log is a copy of something the round trip already knows
Every row in this file exists because the request and the answer live in two different places — your sent folder and someone’s memory. In Blocks they are one record. The rooming list goes to the hotel Blocks-branded on your click, never automatically; the send is kept against that hotel’s conversation, so what you sent and when is a fact rather than a recollection; and the hotel’s reply comes back against that same record instead of into one person’s mailbox.
Department leads file their own changes through their portal for you to approve rather than emailing you a spreadsheet, and when the hotel returns its confirmed list, Blocks compares it with the one you sent — matched on the confirmation number first, the name second — and proposes each correction for you to confirm. Nothing changes on a reservation until you say so.
Rooming list change log questions
What belongs in the log, how to cancel a room, and where the audit picks up.
What is a rooming list change log?
How do you cancel a room on a hotel rooming list?
Should I send the hotel changes only, or a whole new rooming list?
How do you handle a name substitution on a room block?
What is the difference between a change log and a rooming list audit?
Do hotels have to accept changes after the cutoff date?
Have more questions? Check our glossary of terms or get in touch.
Go deeper
How Blocks handles the jobs this work depends on — plus the terms and guides behind them.
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 →Rooming-list audit
The hotel returns your rooming list in its own room codes and its own name format, and the differences that matter are buried in the ones that do not. The rooming-list audit reads the hotel’s file on its own terms and hands you the short list of what genuinely disagrees.
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 →Bring us your next room block.
See how your team can track deadlines, place guests, and check the hotel’s list in one live plan.