Okay serious question about why adjoining hotel rooms are so hard to get. Â I’m sure that there’s a reason for it, but I’m hoping someone perhaps in the hotel or hospitality industry can help me understand why it seems adjoining rooms in hotels seems like something mythical
A little bit of background on why we prefer adjoining hotel rooms
When I talk about adjoining hotel rooms, what I mean are two separate rooms that have a door in between them as well. Â Sometimes I hear these called connecting hotel rooms as well. Â Having the door between the two hotel adjoining rooms means that even though you’re paying for two hotel rooms, you can essentially treat this as one big hotel room
I know that many travelers AVOID having adjoining hotel rooms, because the perception (and probably the reality) is that the door directly to another room is not as soundproof as a wall would be, so you are more able to hear noise from the other rooms.
Our kids are getting older, but I’m not sure they are quite ready to stay in a hotel room by themselves, so getting adjoining hotel rooms for us means the difference between getting to share a bed with my wife and sharing a bed with a wiggly 8 year old.
Finding if a hotel has adjoining hotel rooms
It’s hard to find out what hotels have adjoining hotel rooms – usually on their hotel website whether or not a hotel has adjoining or connecting hotel rooms is not mentioned.  Because adjoining hotel rooms are so important to our family, I will sometimes call or tweet out to several hotels in the area we’re looking at  to see if the hotel even HAS adjoining rooms
(SEE ALSO: List of airline and hotel Twitter contacts)
One trend I’ve noticed in newer hotels is that often the adjoining hotel rooms are a regular room and then an accessible (ADA complaint) room. Â I guess that makes sense since one of the use cases for adjoining rooms is traveling with someone that might need help – either in a wheelchair or otherwise needing an accessible room. Â Reaching out to the hotel can often tell you which TYPES of rooms are adjoining (meaning king bed / 2 double beds / etc), so you can reserve the right kind of rooms (though with points reservations, you often don’t get that choice)
How to get adjoining hotel rooms
So once I figure out which hotels have adjoining hotel rooms, then it’s a matter of putting in my request. Â I usually put that into my “additional requests” field on the reservation. Â Of course, as hotels so often remind me, this is only a “request” and is not “guaranteed”.
I usually also call the hotel room the day before and/or the day after just to see if it’s possible.
Why is getting adjoining hotel rooms so hard?
We’ve struck out the last several times trying to get adjoining rooms at hotels. Â I understand that sometimes the rooms that are adjoining are not always going to be available – either by other people requesting adjoining rooms, or just full with single groups that happen to be in the rooms that are adjoining.
But it just feels like it shouldn’t be that hard?!? Â I am looking for anyone that has any hotel front desk experience as to how rooms are assigned. Â I get that sometimes it won’t happen, but my gut says that it should be possible more often than not. Â But I admit that I am clueless as to how hotel rooms get assigned. Â Is it not possible to “block” off some rooms if I call up the night before or morning of? Â Is it a factor of check-in time? Â Like if I check in at 3pm I have a better chance than if I check in at 9pm?
Do you know any tricks for getting adjoining hotel rooms? Â Leave your insight in the comments
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
The answer might be obvious, Dan; but I will ask the question anyway: the first thought which occurred to me after reading this article is that you travel a lot — and therefore you would have elite level status in a frequent guest loyalty program. Are you searching for upgraded rooms for your hotel states with your family? If so, there are a limited amount of upgraded rooms and therefore may contribute to the difficult of finding rooms with a connecting doorway.
The funny thing is that I just read somewhere on FlyerTalk a complaint about a member who did not want a room with a door to the adjacent room and then got one anyway…
No – I’m just searching for regular rooms. Usually I’m paying with points anyways which typically only books into the standard room.
Also, when I talk to the hotel, typically I will tell them that adjoining rooms are the most important thing to me and they can put me in any type of room configuration (single, double, accessible, whatever) if they make it adjoining. I still get nuttin….
Hah seems like every time I stay at a chain hotel I always ask the front desk to make sure the room does not have an adjoining door as there is always ZERO sound attenuation between doors. Many times the agent has to change my room because the room is indeed “connected” – perhaps it is the rate I’m paying, or non-renovated hotels, but even as an “elite” I’ve been put in these rooms…just happened at a Kimpton property two weeks ago which wasn’t cheap (no way to change as hotel was sold out). Alas, I can’t offer any advice as to why but these unicorn rooms do exist 😉
Right – I know most people don’t like the adjoining hotel rooms
I work at the front desk of a hotel and just wanted to share what we do. If you book directly with the hotel and make your request for connecting rooms when you book, we will “hard block” you in the connecting rooms if available, mo matter how far in advance you’ve booked. The hard blocked rooms are not moved and only reallocated as a last resort. If you book thru an OTA, unfortunately the connecting request is often unintentionally overlooked. I guess every hotel is different, but we always go out of our way if its a family that needs connecting rooms.
Thanks for the info – I was looking for someone with front desk experience to weigh in. I almost always book directly with the hotel directly, and usually on points. My last 2 stays were at 2 different Hyatt Places. Both times I put it in my requests when I booked, a few days beforehand. My experience did not match with what you described – you described what it seemed like SHOULD happen but unfortunately that has not been my experience. I don’t know if you are able to share the hotel you work at, but if not, maybe describe if it’s budget / midrange / high?
As someone also working at the front desk I would agree with Kyna, but there might be the difficulty that even when you think that you book with the hotel directly, it is usually a centralised call center that will handle these calls on bigger hotel chains. Booking, making the request while booking and then calling the hotel directly (not the number for reservations which probably will be forwarded to the call center that maybe doesn’t have any idea if there even are any adjoining rooms available and definitely can’t block any special room numbers at the desired hotel) should do the trick
Typically adjoining rooms are 1 bed adjoining with 2 beds, because they are for families desiring exactly the situation you’re looking for. Here is the challenge:
1. There is little uniformity in when comments are looked at by a hotel’s reservation/desk staff. At the lower end hotels I’ve worked at (4points/Embassy Suites/etc), we wouldn’t look at those comments until the morning of arrival. If we saw the request and had what you wanted, we’d go ahead and assign the room numbers and try and hold them for you. At the nicer hotels (Westin/Sheraton/W) we’d look at the comments a day in advance, assign the room numbers, and hope we can shuffle around room assignments for the current night so that they’d work for you the next night (assign a 1 night stay into your blocked rooms, for example). Hotels that really worked to honor their elite guests would also look at comments in their reservations several days out and try and get them into what they want.
This isn’t saying that a cheaper hotel is worse, but the staffing situation in larger/expensive hotels allows for this added level of service. Hotel staff for the most part want to give you what you want, but service is typically a reflection of the management staff’s desire and attention to detail.
The challenge of delivering on the request is of course room availability. In a hotel where they are running high occupancy on a daily basis, getting guests into the right rooms for the right number of nights is the challenge. This challenge is hard to fully explain without having a visual aide, but just imagine you have 5 pairs of connecting rooms in a 100 room hotel. If the hotel is sold out the night before your arrival, then you have guests of varying stay lengths in all the rooms. Even if you are not sold out, desk agents may not be thinking about whether or not it matters to check a guest into a room with a connecting. Or what if all the 2 bed rooms are booked by a group staying through your arrival? Lots of variables. For a very well run front desk which has the time and desire they can make it happen more often than not, but they also have a sales department trying their best to sell every room in the hotel to groups which hampers their ability to service the individual guests.
Hope this made sense.
-A former desk agent, front desk manager, guest service manager, reservation manager, front office manager, director of service, and assistant gm.
John – thanks for the very detailed reply. I was looking for someone with your experience to weigh in. I TOTALLY understand the problems with room availability. In fact, one hotel I called for my most recent trip said they almost never can give adjoining hotel rooms because they run close to 100% occupancy, which I understand.
Your comment on the “quality” of the hotel seems to make sense. It jives with my thought that assigning hotel rooms SHOULD be able to happen for guests that request them most of the time, but some hotels might not do it because they either don’t look at it, or don’t care or have other priorities to focus on
I have better luck when I call the hotel a couple days after making the reservation.
I would note that a couple of hotels I’ve visited regularly over the years have recently renovated and gotten rid of interior connecting rooms. As other posters have said, most people hate the doors.
My situation is the opposite. I do not want an adjoining room, but have got them occasionally. How do I avoid this – put request in booking? It is silly how hotels allocated family in separate rooms and couple in an adjoining room.
Psh. Want an adjoining room? Travel with me. I get one about 60-75% of the time.
Just a question for you: do you usually specify 4 people per room? There was a very brief mention in one comment that connecting rooms are often a king room and one with two beds. If you are telling them that you want two rooms with both having room for 4, I think that is much less common. We have seemingly had more luck than you with getting connecting rooms, but we are almost always looking for a room for my wife and me and another for our 4 kids.
Sometimes I do but usually I don’t – I usually just put 1 adult because I’m too lazy to change the defaults and I know it doesn’t matter :-). Plus what is with hotels making me put in the ages of all my kids when I search for rooms?!?!
I know, it drives me nuts and I only have to put 4 ages in! With very rare exceptions (primarily in Asia), it makes absolutely no difference what the ages of your children are. It is not so bad if you are just going in once and booking your room, but I am sure that you, like I, do quite a lot of shopping before deciding on a room and actually pulling the trigger.
Right. And even in the cases where it DOES matter, it usually only matters if you’re booking a cash room (not on points), and since 95% of my bookings are on points, it matters even less.
For those wanting help in getting/not getting a connecting room. Your best bet is to contact the hotel a few days out from your arrival date, making sure you speak with someone at the property. Don’t call and ask for reservations, many hotels transfer those calls offsite to the 1-800 call centers. Make sure you get a desk agent or an onsite reservationist (many larger hotels still keep one or two on staff to do the internal group reservations and other internal tasks related to reservations. Barring an internal policy of not blocking room numbers prior to arrival, the staff members will give you the standard phrasing of nothing is guaranteed while they are actually blocking off specific room numbers for your stay and inserting their own internal comments to try and keep you in those rooms. Of course, like I said before, sometimes it won’t work out due to the way the length of stays of arrivals for the preceding nights of your reservation work out. Same goes for if you don’t want a connecting room, of course you’d probably want to make clear to the staff that you have some sort of fear of connecting doors per a past experience so that they take it more seriously than the standard request.
And please never say “I booked this 6 months ago and don’t understand why you couldn’t do it.” When you booked doesn’t matter, it’s all about the availability beginning a few days out from your arrival.
Nice post Dan, good topic of discussion which can help people with families. I have an 11 month old, so I’ve had to begin thinking about family travel planning as opposed to the glory of being free and flexible before.
I’ve definitely been speaking to someone on staff but perhaps that’s my problem that I’m calling too soon to my stay and the rooms are already booked up. Next time I will call a few days out instead of the day before.
No these responses do not make sense. I am in hospitality too….which also translates into ‘customer service’. Some hotel brands will tell you it’s a request not a guarantee, because they reserve a room type, not an actual room. Hmmm…I call B.S….an adjoining room is a room type, especially to the large family that want their kids in the same connected room…no different than someone requesting 2 doubles rather than a king. The customer is requesting how many beds they want in a room, the case of the adjoining room it’s just more beds…they are already getting screwed on the cost because the cost of the second room is DOUBLE where the cost of a room with 2 double beds is usually just a few $ more than the single King rm. It’s total BS, don’t book those rooms, block them…the hotel has X amount, then you only take reservations for x amount…just like you do for doubles vs. singles. If someone wants to do it they can, they choose not to…consciously choosing to attempt to maximize their occupancy over serving the customer. It’s been done, everything else in an excuse.
Oh, and by the way, Hyatt will guarantee if you have kids under 12. So it can be done if they want to.