A public way to check that a room exists

Abstract

In August 2026 a Las Vegas hotel sold its rooms under two hotel names that do not exist, on six booking sites, with altered photos. In the same month, seventeen generated videos on TikTok sold a suite at an Arizona resort that the resort does not have. In neither case could a booking site, a guest, or a software agent check the one fact that mattered: does this room exist, and is it the same room as that one?

Lodging has no public identifier for the thing it sells. OpenRoomID defines roomID, a permanent, publicly resolvable identifier for a single accommodation unit and for the property that contains it. Assignment and resolution are free. The resolver answers one question, whether an identifier is active, superseded, retired, or unknown, and refuses to answer any other.

Contents

1. The problem: two cases from one month, why now, and prior art
2. Design principles
3. The identifier, and why a suffix letter and not a check character
4. Lifecycle
5. Resolution: four answers and nothing else
6. The rule this makes enforceable: one roomID, one live listing
7. Where the records come from: three provenance tiers
8. Governance: the sponsor, and what holds the line
9. Adoption
10. What OpenRoomID is not
11. Open questions

Comments

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