Field note · 21 June 2026
Wash on a group allotment along Sukhumvit
Sukhumvit hotels live with groups: tours, company off-sites, and the occasional wedding that wants a block near the skytrain. The contract looks tidy. The wash is where the month is actually decided, and it is usually decided a few days earlier than the sales recap admits.
Allotment is not pickup
An allotment of forty rooms is a promise to hold, not a count of heads on pillows. Pickup of twenty-two means eighteen rooms return to the house. If they return three days before arrival, a transient guest on Sukhumvit may already have booked somewhere else for those dates. If they return two weeks out, the desk still has a chance, especially on a Thursday or a Sunday when independent travelers are still arranging themselves.
We draw pickup against the original hold, night by night, and we mark the release the hotel actually used. Contracts often say fourteen days. Desks often release at seven, or hold until four because a salesperson is still hoping. The chart follows the desk, then the note quotes the contract beside it. The gap between those two dates is frequently the whole story.
Walk-ins are part of the transient count
Walk-ins along this road are uneven. Rain, a cancelled flight, a conference that ran late: some nights the desk can fill a washed room at the door, and some nights the door is quiet. If walk-ins are folded into a general transient number, you cannot see whether the washed rooms were saved by chance. We ask the night auditor to keep the walk-in mark even when it is zero.
Complimentary rooms inside a block deserve their own mark too. A tour leader's room is not unsold, and it is not a paying transient. Leaving it inside pickup flatters the block. Pulling it out without a note startles the salesperson who thought the pickup was twenty-two.
Before you initial the same dates next year
Lay the washed nights next to the transient nights that were already full before the release. If the house was full anyway, the wash cost little. If the washed rooms stayed empty, the block crowded out days you might have sold, or it simply occupied inventory nobody else wanted. Those are different reasons to accept the group again. The Group and Transient Mix is the commission we use when a hotel wants that month drawn properly before the next contract.