Optimal profit for hotel operation

This study deals with finding an optimal rule for accepting customers at a hotel through the course of a day. Previous endeavors have developed heuristic methods for approximating the optimal rule. Found here are the optimal rules for the cases with no reservations allowed and either a single room type or multiple room types. A Dynamic Programming method is used to generate the optimal rules. There does not seem to be any reason why the method used here could not be extended to include the possibility of reservations for some of the customers. Also, this approach may be effective in solving the more general problem of considering multiple night stays. Finally, the approach used here can be applied to similar problems in other industries such as the Airline industry.