Another scenario to further illustrate the booking window. If you want to make a reservation where you check out on the last day of the month, you sometimes have to wait a little bit longer to call MS. The best example of this is a vacation where you are going to check out on February 1st. Since you need to have a room on the night of January 31st, the earliest that you can reserve this day is February 31st of the previous year. Whoops. There is no February 31st. So you actually have to wait until March 1st to call MS in order to reserve January 29, 30, or 31st. You got that? I'll put it another way. (NOTE: I am not taking into account the fact that MS is closed on the weekends)
Desired Date / Earliest you can call MS
Jan 28, 2002 Feb 28, 2001
Jan 29, 2002 Mar 1, 2001
Jan 30, 2002 Mar 1, 2001
Jan 31, 2002 Mar 1, 2001
Feb 1, 2002 Mar 1, 2001
Feb 2, 2002 Mar 2, 2001
You can see that if March 1st falls on a Saturday, you might have to wait nearly a week in order to reserve rooms near the end of January. Of course, this is the worst case scenario due to the fact that February has so few days. But I hope you get the picture.
Perhaps we DO need a piece of software to figure this out.