Tavern Master: Ultimate Hotel Guide

So, to optimize your hotel rooms, you need to understand how profit is determined. Each room is classified from 1-5 stars, and the more stars it has, the more someone is willing to pay for it. Only star rating matters; increasing the number of decorations, adding extra furniture, putting in more windows, none of that stuff will help you sell a room. And the most profitable rooms are, not surprisingly, 5 star rooms. So what does that take?

You need a 5 star bed, a 5 star wardrobe, one door, two window, a bath, fireplace, nightstand, and a light (I use a chandelier). Putting all of these in an area of at least 256 spaces (4 sections) will give you a 5 star room with one bed and a lot of empty space. And empty space means missed profit; we can do better.

It turns out, a hotel room can have up to 5 beds in it and still be valid. And adding more beds doesn’t require adding anything else. You still only need one wardrobe, one nightstand, one bath, etc., regardless of how many beds you have in the room. All told, you can fit four double beds and a single, plus all the other stuff, in 384 spaces (6 sections). There’s even room for an extra decoration or two if you’re feeling generous. This gives you total sleeping area for 9 people, each of whom is paying a premium for a 5 star room. Now, that premium isn’t as high as they would pay if they had the room to themselves. But if you go with one bed to a room, you end up buying five times the amount of furniture and using up a lot more space, so this method give you more profit for less investment and in a maximally compact form.

You do have to be a little careful with positioning here. A person can walk by the foot and sides of the bed, but the headboard is impassible. If the headboard is blocking access to a bed, guests won’t pay for the spot and waitresses won’t make the bed. A good way to test is to go into third-person mode and walk through the room yourself, making sure you can get to both sides of every bed. As far as I can tell, you don’t technically need to be able to access any of the other furniture in the room, so long as it’s there.

The only question left is how much you charge. Higher prices lessen the odds that someone will rend the room, and lower prices increase the odds of a rental. So what’s the ideal price point? A bit of trial and error tells me that the ideal price point is 333-334 gold, which comes with a 2/3 chance the bed will be rented for the night. That’s an average of 222 gold per sleeping space, which is 2000 gold per room per night (depending on how you round) which is a pretty solid amount of money.

So, a good inn has more than one room available to rent, so let’s put more in. Each room takes up 6 grid sections, and there’s 60 grid sections to a floor, so in theory you can put 10 rooms in a floor, right? Problem is, there’s some restrictions. Every room needs to have 2 windows and a door. Even Worse, those whiny customers insist on having access to their rooms, which means that the door has to connect to a hallway that connects to a staircase. So, my layout below has 8 rooms to a floor, all around the perimeter. You can cram a 9th in there if you want, but I don’t recommend it. This gives you space which you can use for bathrooms, games, research desks, fire extinguishers, waitress stations, or whatever else you want. I put the rooms on the perimeter so the windows are all facing outside, but that’s not technically necessary. The only requirement is that your room have windows, and whether those windows face the beautiful outdoors or the toilets inside doesn’t seem to make a difference.

With 8 rooms each giving you 334 gold per guest, with 9 spots that each have a 2/3 chance of being occupied, that averages out to 16,000 gold per night. That is a good chunk of change for a single floor. Put 3 floors like this in your tavern, and that’s 48,000 gold per night, on top of whatever other income you get. And since you only pay for a few waitresses to clean them and wax for the chandeliers, your upkeep is minimal. No sending adventurers to risk life and limb for strawberries, no buying drinks or paying for food, nor do you have to put up with bars or kitchens and their accompanying staff.

And those are the secrets of a good hotel room.