And tomorrow?

I was happy to find mail in my mailbox today. My friend Angelica had sent me a letter and both my mom and sister sent me letters. My mom also sent me two necklaces she had made- one with my puppy Basil's fur sewn onto it! (By the way, that's a candid picture taken by my friend Harley, who stole my camera.) It's nice to really enjoy living by myself, but it's also nice to still feel the connection between me and my family/friends.

Like usual, I got to class around 15 minutes early, so I took several pictures of people in the room.

This is Reneta, one of my professors. At the beginning of this course, everyone thought Mark was the carefree, laid-back professor and Reneta was the strict one. Slowly, their roles switched, even though Mark is still the one who makes funny jokes 20 times a day. Both of them are equally and very dedicated to hospitality and teaching hospitality.

This is our head TA, Gorka. He is an endless source of help everyday in class and during office/lab hours. Everyone in class loves him. People even made shirts with his name on it and everything- boys and girls alike.

This is my friend Margot, who was being silly and decided to come stand right in front of the camera.

In class, we learned about the payoff matrix for hotels. This is how hotels determine whether it is worthwhile for them to overbook or oversell rooms. (Overbooked refers to a hotel that has booked more reservations than there is room for, while oversold simply means that every guest who made a reservation actually showed up to the hotel.)

Hotel managers of front desk clerks who decide whether or not to walk a guest must take into consideration the revenue forgone by having rooms sit empty (calculated by average daily rate minus marginal costs), probabilities of no-shows, and the cost to the hotel because of overselling.

How much it would cost the hotel to walk a guest because of overbooking or overselling is determined by

a) the rate for the hotel that the guest is being sent to

b) transportation, severed possibility of future visit

c) hotel's reputation

We discussed whether or not intentionally overbooking a hotel is ethical, under what circumstances a hotel would intentionally overbook and the consequences that could come with overbooking. We also compared overbooking in the hotel industry to overbooking on airplanes, and learned how to calculate values needed for the payoff matrix on Excel.

It was a lecture of pretty dense material. I would have never thought of all the hard work and critical thinking that goes into overbooking and walking guests. It's really incredible.

During break, my classmates were too tired to even go buy coffee. Instead, everyone collapsed on the comfortable benches outside of the classroom:

I wonder what tomorrow's class will bring.