Room assignment reimagined: automatic, rule-aware, reviewable 2026/04/14
Assigning participants to physical rooms is one of the most time-consuming planning tasks in any season. Mixed groups, separate genders, rooms for supervisors, friends who want to stay together, one-week and two-week participants in the same building — juggling all of that in a spreadsheet is error-prone. This release extends the automatic room assignment in two places: on the detail page of group bookings, and — entirely new — inside a planning mode on the Daily Occupancy view for individual bookings.
Group bookings: assign by gender and supervisor separation
The detail page of a group booking already offered an "Assign automatically" button that distributed everyone into free rooms. The button now presents two options before running, both enabled by default:
- Separate genders — female and male participants no longer share a room.
- Separate supervisors from participants — supervisors and minors stay in different rooms. This option only appears if the group actually has supervisors recorded.
The rewritten algorithm treats gender and supervisor status as hard constraints and balances them against the available room capacity. When capacity is insufficient the system assigns what it can and gives clear feedback — nobody is silently dropped. Bookings with gender "diverse" are shown but deliberately left out of the automatic run so they can be planned manually in peace.
Individual bookings: the new planning mode in Daily Occupancy
Daily Occupancy now has a new Plan room assignments button next to the Excel export. It opens a planning mode that collects every individual booking of the day that does not yet have a room, groups them per accommodation and session, and computes a proposal. Bookings that already have a room are left untouched.
The proposal honours the following criteria in priority order:
- Gender (male / female) — hard separation; "diverse" is listed separately and not auto-assigned.
- Room partner wishes — the free-text "Lodging partner" field is parsed and matched against the first and last names of other bookings in the same session. Participants who mention each other are kept together whenever possible.
- Age group — Junior (7–11), Senior (12–14) and Senior+ (15–17) are grouped together as much as possible within the gender category.
- Session duration — one-week and two-week participants are kept apart when possible. If capacity forces them to share a room, the affected room is flagged with a hint.
Before anything is written to the database, the planning mode shows the complete proposal in a table. Every row lets the planner override the proposed room via dropdown before clicking Confirm assignment to make the proposal final. The confirm step re-verifies capacity on the server, so even when multiple people plan at the same time, rooms cannot be overbooked.
Why this matters
What used to be handled half manually and half by gut feeling is now reproducible and auditable. Less time spent before arrivals, fewer mistakes with gender separation, and friends' room preferences respected — without the planner having to keep the entire participant list in their head. And if something changes at the last minute, the planning mode can be opened again at any time: bookings already assigned stay put, new ones are added to the proposal.
The feature is available now for all accounts and requires no configuration.
Author: Mathias Methner