Overbooking

This page explains how to handle overbookings

Overbookings

An overbooking is a situation where you have more bookings than you have rooms. A negative inventory in the control panel CALENDAR indicates that there is an overbooking. In this case you will also see a warning in the "Potential Issues" on the DASHBOARD and under SUPPORT.

An positive or 0 inventory means there is no overbooking.

Overbookings are rare but if they occur common reasons are:

• You have manually added or uploaded a booking even though there was no availability.
• An online booking was accepted even through there was no availability at the time of the booking. Common reasons are :
  • You have a number of contracted rooms/base allocation.
  • The channel managers updates were ignored by the channel because of an error.

Each overbooking needs to be investigated individually. Please send us a support ticket with the booking number which caused the overbooking so we can check.

Overbooking protection

We recommend you set "Overbooking Protection" in SETTINGS->PROPERTIES->ROOMS->SET UP to "Property". This setting will use the total bookings in room up to room qty AND total bookings in property up to total rooms in property to calculate availabilty. Meaning the room will be closed if the number of bookings in all rooms in the property is greater or equal to the total number of rooms in the property. This could occur because of an overbooking in a different room.

Hidden rooms are not included in the calculation of property availability.

Multiple bookings in one unit are not overbookings

Example: You have 3 double rooms (double room 1, double room 2, double room 3) and 2 bookings are placed in double room 1.

The system will try and place the guest in one room if it is available. If there is no one room available for the duration of the booking, the system will still put them into the room type any way it can so the inventory is calculated correctly for each date.

If this causes parties in the same room for part of the stay you will then need to shuffle the guests and the rooms. There will still be enough rooms on each night, it will not allow an overbooking.

For more information how to fix this have a look here