On purpose and by accident
Deliberate overbooking is a revenue decision: if a hotel knows that a few bookings on a busy night never arrive, it accepts a few more than it has rooms. The risk is the night everyone turns up — the hotel then has to "walk" a guest to another hotel, usually paying for the room and the transfer, and absorb the review.
Accidental overbooking — a double booking — is the common kind at an independent property. A room is sold on one booking site, and before that sale reaches the other sites (or the register at the desk), it is sold again. Calendar links between sites refresh periodically rather than instantly, so there is always a gap; manual updates widen it.
How to prevent it
- One room rack that everything books into, and that refuses a second booking for a room that is taken.
- Calendar sync with each booking site that offers it — see iCal sync — and checking that each sync is actually working.
- For sites with no sync, closing the last rooms by hand on their extranet when you are nearly full.
Example
Your last deluxe room sells on Booking.com at 9:02 pm, and at 9:05 pm a couple walks in and the desk sells it again. If the calendar sync has not run in those three minutes, one of the two bookings has no room.
How Nivasik handles it
- The room rack refuses double bookings.
- Two-way calendar sync with Airbnb and Booking.com: a booking on either blocks the room in Nivasik, and a booking in Nivasik blocks it there.
- A channel whose calendar could not be read is flagged on the screen, because until it is fixed its bookings are not blocking your rooms.
- Every calendar read, import and failure is logged, so "why is that room blocked?" has an answer.