Manage amenities

Define your institution's room equipment and feature catalog, attach amenities to rooms, and use them to find the right space when booking.

Amenities are the equipment and feature labels your institution uses to describe what a room offers — for example a projector, whiteboard, laboratory benches, or wheelchair access. They form a shared catalog: you define each amenity once, then attach it to the rooms (and room setups) that actually have that equipment or feature.

Amenities live alongside rooms in OrgHub → Database → Rooms. You attach them when creating or editing a room, and you can add them in bulk from the Rooms tab. They are distinct from locations (buildings and campuses) and from free-text Tags (search nicknames).

Why it matters

Timetable staff rarely ask only “is any room free?” They ask “is there a free room with a projector and step-free access for 40 people?” Without a shared amenities catalog:

• Equipment knowledge lives in someone’s head or a separate spreadsheet.
• Identical rooms are described with inconsistent wording (“beamer” vs “projector”).
• Accessibility and specialist lab needs are invisible until someone arrives and discovers a mismatch.
• Bulk updates after renovations are almost impossible.

A maintained amenity catalog turns equipment into searchable master data that booking workflows can use when assigning a room to an appointment.

How it fits

Amenities can be listed, created, updated, and deleted as catalog entries for your institution. Linking an amenity to a room (or replacing the set of linked amenities) is part of room create and edit — including bulk assignment from the Rooms table.

Key terms

Typical amenity categories

Universities commonly maintain labels across a few practical groups. Frame these as guidance for designing your catalog — exact names should match how staff actually speak on campus:

Prefer a short, stable list of high-value amenities over hundreds of minor fixtures. Planners will only search for what they trust.

Maintain the amenities catalog

Your institution keeps a catalog of amenity labels that rooms can reuse. Each entry has:

You can create new labels, rename or restyle existing ones, and delete labels that are no longer used. Treat renames carefully: the label is what staff recognize when attaching amenities to rooms and when scanning equipment lists.

When you delete an amenity from the catalog, plan a cleanup pass on rooms that still referenced it so equipment lists stay truthful. Prefer renaming a widely used label over deleting and recreating it under a new name.

Attach amenities to rooms

Amenities only help booking once they are linked to the right spaces.

When creating a room

In the Create Room sheet, optionally add Amenities from the institution catalog before you select Create. See Create a room.

When editing a single room

On the room Settings tab, update Amenities for that room, then save. See Edit a room.

In bulk from the Rooms table

Bulk tagging is the fastest path after a wing renovation or when rolling out a new AV standard across similar seminar rooms.

Setups and amenities

If a room has multiple setups, amenity configurations can differ by layout. Keep setup-level amenities aligned with what is actually available in that configuration so the appointment picker does not advertise kit that only exists in another layout.

How amenities help find the right room

During scheduling, staff search and select rooms from the appointment Add location field. A consistent amenity catalog supports that workflow in several ways:

• Discovery — equipment labels make it easier to distinguish otherwise similar halls.
• Fitness for purpose — accessibility and lab requirements are visible before a booking is confirmed.
• Fewer day-of surprises — planners stop relying on tribal knowledge about which room “usually has a projector.”
• Estate insight — combined with utilization, you can see whether well-equipped rooms are over- or under-used.

Tags remain useful for informal nicknames and search shortcuts; they are not a substitute for a controlled equipment vocabulary.

Best practices

• Agree naming conventions with facilities and timetable teams (one word for “projector,” not three synonyms).
• Review amenities after every renovation or AV refresh — stale labels cause worse decisions than missing labels.
• Use bulk assignment when an entire floor receives the same kit; use per-room edits for exceptions.
• Separate accessibility amenities clearly so they are never buried under generic “AV” labels.
• Keep location assignment and amenity tagging as two deliberate steps when onboarding a new building.

Common pitfalls

• Putting equipment notes only in Room Address Notes — notes help wayfinding, but they are not a searchable amenity catalog.
• Creating near-duplicate amenities (“Beamer”, “Projector”, “Proj.”) that fragment tagging.
• Bulk-applying a full amenity set to mixed rooms (labs and lecture halls) without spot-checking.
• Assuming location membership implies equipment — a building can contain rooms with very different kits.

FAQ

Related pages