Maintenance blocks


Why	Take a specific room off sale for dates — for maintenance or another in-house reason — and put it back on sale once the work is done.
Who	Hotel administrators and front desk staff who run the grid.
What you’ll get	A block bar on the grid: on the selected dates the room is taken for new bookings and does not count as available; the bar drags like a booking bar.
Limitations	A block is a grid tool for a single room. If a date needs to come off sale not for one room but across all channels, that is closing sales in the Channel Manager — a separate mechanism.

Sometimes a room is needed for reasons other than guests: maintenance, plumbing, moving furniture around. So that nobody occupies the room on those dates, block it — with a click right on the grid. A block lives on the grid like a booking: the bar can be dragged somewhere else, and once the reason goes away — removed.

Here is the full picture: how a block differs from closing sales, how to place one, how to move it, what it does to availability, and how to remove it.

A maintenance block is not a stop-sell

A block is about one room: it hides a specific room from sale on the selected dates. The spot on the grid is taken, and no new bookings can be made on that room for those dates.

Closing sales is a tool of a different level, and it lives not on the grid but in the Channel Manager. Closing sales zeroes the quotas in all channels — the date goes off sale everywhere at once.

The two mechanisms do not replace each other. A block is for when a single room comes off sale while the rest of the property carries on. Closing sales is for when a date must disappear from sale entirely, across every channel at once.

Hence the terminology rule: stop-sell refers to exactly that, the channel-level closure; it is not used for maintenance blocks. A room goes in for repair — the word is “block”.

The block itself is visible right on the grid — as a bar in the row of the room it concerns.

Place a block

A block is placed from the same spot as a quick booking — from a cell on the grid. If the exact dates of the work are not known yet, place it on what you know now — the bar can be moved later (see below):

Open the Planner in the left menu.
Find the row of the room you need and the date the maintenance starts. A row is a physical room, a column is a date.
Click a free cell where they intersect — or drag the selection across the whole date range at once.
The “Create booking” modal opens — the same one used for a quick booking from a cell. Flip the toggle from “Booking” to “Block”.
Add a reason — for example, “Maintenance”.
Save.

Result: a block bar appears on the grid — the room is hidden from sale on the selected dates.

One modal serves both bookings and blocks — the toggle decides. Leave it on “Booking” and you get a booking: Create a booking in 4 clicks. Choose “Block” and a block bar lands on the grid.

Blocks drag like bookings

A block bar behaves like a booking bar — drag it around the grid the same way. The maintenance moved a week later? Pull the bar to the new dates or another row — no need to remove the block and place it again.

Like a booking, a block takes up its spot on the room’s row: on the blocked dates that spot does not count as free.

The loop closes neatly: place it with a click, move it with the mouse, remove it once the room is back in service. All of it happens on the grid — no workarounds.

How a block affects availability

A blocked room is taken for new bookings: it cannot be sold for those dates, and a new guest will not get that room for the blocked dates.

For the front desk this is a simple rule: a blocked room is as good as occupied — never take it for a new booking.

A block is not a booking, though: it never lands in “occupied”. Available rooms are counted as total − occupied − blocked, and blocks are subtracted as a separate term.

The subtraction works both ways: remove a block and availability goes up, place a new one and it goes down.

This applies to every free-room counter — for instance, the dashboard tiles “Rooms free” and “Free physical rooms”: a blocked room never lands in them. So a block never inflates the availability numbers — the counters show honest figures. If a property has nine rooms, one is blocked for maintenance, and two are taken by guests, six will show as free: nine minus two occupied minus one blocked.

Remove a block

The maintenance finished early — the room goes back on sale. A block is removed the same way a booking is canceled: through the block’s status, or by deleting its bar. There is no separate “unblock” action to hunt for — the same mechanics as a booking cancellation apply.

Find the block bar on the grid.
Remove it the way you would cancel a booking: through its status — or by deleting the bar. The step-by-step cancellation path (the status menu, the confirmation) is covered in Change or cancel a booking — for a block it works the same.
If the work runs long, remove nothing — just drag the bar to the new dates (see above).

Result: the room accepts new bookings again and returns to the available count.

Once the block is gone, everything falls back into place: the room can be sold again, and the free-room counters include it once more. If the maintenance flares up again, the block goes back on — with the same click on a cell.