Creating the room itself takes about ten seconds. Getting it ready to sell takes longer, because a new room touches your rate types, taxes, reports, connected OTAs, and in some cases your website and your integrations.

This article covers all of it. Not every section will apply to your property, so use the checklist to find the ones that do and skip the rest.

Go to Settings > Rooms and click New in the upper right.

Every field on the new room starts at a default, so plan to work through each section of the room settings and set it to match how you actually sell the room. Room Settings Overview explains every field. The sections below cover the ones that matter most, plus everything that lives outside of room settings.

Important: a new room is active and visible in the Booking Engine from the moment you create it. Guests won't see it until it has pricing, since pricing and availability go hand in hand. If you'd rather set it up privately anyway, open the room, scroll to OPTIONS, and turn on Do not show this room in the Booking Engine. Turn it back off when you're ready to sell.

Required before the room can be sold

Review if it applies to you

Good to know

A few of these need a request to us. Those are called out in each section and gathered in What to ask us for toward the end.

A room with no pricing has no availability, so it can't be reserved anywhere. This is the step that makes the room bookable.

For each rate type the room should sell under:

Do this for every rate type the room belongs in, including room packages, derived rates, non-refundable rates, and anything tied to a promotion code or customer group. Rate types don't automatically include newly created rooms, so a rate type you skip is a rate type the room will never sell under.

See Manage Your Rate Types, How to Create a New Rate Type, How to Create a Derived Rate, and Create a Room Package.

A new room starts with no taxes checked. Open the room and find the TAXES section, which holds three separate sets of checkboxes:

A checked box means the tax applies. Open an existing room that should be taxed the same way and match it.

This is the easiest item on the list to miss, and missing it means you undercollect on every booking for that room. See Updating Item and Room Tax Settings and Changing Tax Settings.

Work through the OCCUPANCY, ADULT CONFIGURATION, CHILDREN CONFIGURATION, and PET CONFIGURATION sections. The defaults here rarely match a real room.

Configure the adult and child settings even if occupancy restrictions are turned off in your Booking Engine Settings. If you charge a pet fee per pet per night, handle it with an Item rather than the pet fee field, and set the pet configuration to zero. See Pet Fee Options.

In the REVENUE ACCOUNTS section, set:

These pull from your Chart of Accounts. Leave them unset and revenue from the new room won't land where you expect it in your reports or in your accounting export.

These settings are not expressly required, but are key to providing descriptive information to your guests and staff. In Settings > Rooms, review:

If you sell by room type rather than individually, the new room needs to join a room type. Room types are set up on our end, so contact Support with the room type name as you want it to appear on the Booking Engine and the rooms that belong to it. See Selling Rooms Individually or Selling Rooms by Type.

Joining a type does most of the configuration work for you. These settings sync from the type:

Once the room is created, added to the type, and visible in the Booking Engine, it's bookable. The only per-room fields you'd still want to fill in are the ones you actually use, most often Directions and Additional information if those appear in your templates.

Important: changing a synced setting on one room in a type changes it for every room in that type.

A new room won't appear on Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, Vrbo, or any other connected channel on its own. It has to be mapped, and that takes two steps in order:

Until mapping is done, the room sells direct only, so start this early if you have a date in mind. After mapping, availability follows your pricing: a price gives the room availability on the channel, and removing the price or setting a Stop Sell takes it away. See Channel Manager Overview and Control OTAs Rates and Availability.

If you're a Think Websites client, the new room's page on your website is created for you and can be deployed by our Web Services team. Please notify us upon room creation and include the following details in your request:

Email services@thinkreservations.com to submit your request.

If you use automatic yield management, check your plans in Settings > Yield Management Plans.

A room left out of a plan holds whatever price you set by hand while the rest of your rooms move around it. See Yield Management Plans: Automatic Rate Adjustments and Considerations for Automatic Yield Management.

Same rule as yield plans. Any upsell item or promotion configured for specific rooms won't include the new room until you add it. Open each one and add the room where it belongs. See Upsell Portal: Walkthrough and Promotions Overview.

Two room-level fields feed personalized variables in your guest correspondence, and both start empty:

If your templates use either variable, fill these in before the first guest books. Otherwise that guest's confirmation or pre-arrival email goes out missing the content for this room. See Personalized Variables.

If you use third-party integrations such as point of sale, door locks, or revenue management, a new room may need to be added or mapped on that side as well. What's required varies quite a bit from one integration to the next, so contact Support with your specific setup and we'll tell you what needs to happen. See Integrations.

There are two room orders, and they work differently.

Most of this you can do yourself. These are the pieces that need a request:

The room shows up in your Housekeeping module on its own, so there's nothing to set up there.

Occupancy reporting needs a heads up. Occupancy is calculated against your current room count, including for dates in the past. Once the new room is on your account, occupancy for dates before the room existed is calculated as though it had been available then. Historical occupancy will read slightly lower than it did before, and year over year comparisons will shift.

Revenue figures aren't affected. Make a note of the date your new room went live so you can account for the difference when you look back at your numbers. See Reports Overview.

If what you're adding isn't a guestroom, the OPTIONS section has two toggles worth knowing about. This room is not a real room and should not be counted for room revenue or occupancy is for event spaces, parking spots, and similar. There's also a separate toggle that keeps a room out of your occupancy numbers while still counting its revenue, most often used for jack-and-jill rooms.

Most ThinkReservations subscriptions are based on the number of units on your account, so creating a new unit increases your subscription automatically.

We count the maximum number of rooms that can be rented at one time, not the number of bookable line items on your calendar. For example:

If you want to know what your subscription will be before you create the room, contact Support and we'll walk you through it.

If you'd rather not do this alone, contact Support and ask for a Customer Success review. We'll schedule time with a Customer Success Manager to go through the new room with you and make sure it's set up the way you want it.