The Rooms You Cannot Sell

Displacement is treated as an operations problem rather than a project cost, so it never appears in the construction appraisal. The result is a decision to take fewer rooms out of service at once — which extends the program, raises cost per key, and displaces more revenue in total than the faster option would have.

Adjacent rooms are the part most often left out. A room next to active work is frequently unsellable even though it is not out of service, and on a corridor-by-corridor program that can double the effective displacement. A model counting only rooms formally out of order understates the cost substantially.

Take two phasing options, count rooms displaced and for how many nights in each, multiply by the rate those rooms would have achieved in that season, and add the construction cost difference. That is the real comparison and it takes an afternoon.

It frequently reverses the intuitive answer, because the faster program displaces more rooms at once but for far fewer total room-nights. Without the table, owners choose the option that feels less disruptive rather than the one that costs less.

1. 01Provide programs for two or three displacement scenarios.
2. 02Show what each does to cost per key and to duration.
3. 03Be explicit about noise-affected adjacent rooms.
4. 04Let you compare total cost rather than construction cost alone.

Model the fast option and the slow option side by side, including displaced revenue in both. The faster one usually wins by more than owners expect, and the comparison only exists if somebody builds it.

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