HotelFlow: hotels don’t need another dashboard — they need the next action

Solo developer Ravi Saxena built HotelFlow, a hotel operations engine that reads a single Excel workbook of rooms, staff, reservations, rules, and chaos events to generate a live prioritized work queue for the next 5, 15, and 30 minutes. The system scores each job by urgency, guest impact, arrival time, and VIP status, then assigns staff by skill and floor and escalates when no one is free. Saxena said the decision engine is a deterministic module rather than an LLM chatbot, and noted that "conflicting priorities with four people and twelve jobs is the actual product.

This is a submission for the MLH x DEV Writing Challenge https://dev.to/mlh-hackathon Author: Ravi Saxena https://dev.to/ravi saxena 6fd4d0ef1c9cb @ravi saxena 6fd4d0ef1c9cb https://dev.to/ravi saxena 6fd4d0ef1c9cb — solo. No teammates. HotelFlow is a hotel operations engine, not a guest chatbot. After a guest books, the hard part is everything before checkout: late arrivals, dirty rooms, a broken AC, extra towels, a VIP moved up, and two staff off the floor. That story usually lives in WhatsApp and phone calls. A manager keeps asking: what should we do right now? HotelFlow reads one Excel workbook rooms, staff, reservations, rules, chaos events and builds a live queue for the next 5, 15, and 30 minutes . It scores each job urgency + guest impact + arrival time + VIP / out-of-order , assigns people by skill and floor, and escalates if nobody is free. The interesting piece is Event → impact → priority → assignment → resolve . Click Simulate hotel chaos and the plan rewrites itself. I did not build another PMS. I built the layer that decides what is next . What I learned: storing “room 101 = occupied” is easy. Conflicting priorities with four people and twelve jobs is the actual product. Live no login : https://hotelflow-gamma.vercel.app/ https://hotelflow-gamma.vercel.app/ Code: https://github.com/Ravi-Saxena-kronos/hotelflow https://github.com/Ravi-Saxena-kronos/hotelflow Room 302 bathroom is leaking and guest arrives at noon → I did not use a paid MLH perk token in this build. Stack: Next.js 14 , TypeScript, Tailwind, Vercel , and xlsx to import the hotel workbook. The decision engine is in src/lib/engine.ts — not an LLM chatbot. Vercel is serverless, so chaos / resolve / typed incidents send the current hotel state with the request. The default hotel is the Excel file in the repo data/HotelFlow-input-template.xlsx . Solo build. I am the only author. I built HotelFlow as an operations control room for a problem I see in hotels: the desk is not short on screens; it is short on one next action when everything breaks at once. The part I will remember is the chaos button. A calm map is not a demo. Injecting the Excel chaos playbook checkouts, AC, leak, VIP moved to 11:00, two staff unavailable and watching NOW / 15 / 30 reorder is the story.