Overbooking, and how to stop worrying about it

There are few worse moments for a host than two confirmed guests for the same room on the same night. One of them will be disappointed, and it will cost you money, time and very often a review.

How it happens

A double booking is almost never carelessness. It is arithmetic. The same room is on sale in several places at once: Booking.com, Airbnb, perhaps Expedia, your website and your own phone. When it sells in one place, every other place has to be told, immediately. If that is done by hand, there is always a window, a few minutes or a few hours, in which the room is still open somewhere else.

The window is widest exactly when you are busiest: a full weekend, a holiday, the evening when you were going to update the calendars “in a moment”.

What a channel manager changes

A channel manager keeps one calendar for the whole property and connects it to every platform. The idea is simple:

• One inventory. Each room exists once, in one calendar, not five times in five extranets.
• Close everywhere at once. When a room sells on any channel, it is closed on all the others automatically.
• Change a rate once. A new price or a minimum stay is set in one place and sent to every channel.

The safest calendar is the one you only keep once.

Do not forget the bookings you take yourself

Phone calls, WhatsApp messages, a guest who books at the desk for next summer: these must go into the same calendar, or the protection is only partial. The most common double booking in small properties comes from a direct booking written in a notebook and never closed online.

Where Concierva fits

Concierva includes a channel manager connected to Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb and more than 70 other channels. When the AI takes a booking by phone or WhatsApp, it goes into the same calendar and the room closes everywhere. If you already use a PMS, Concierva can work on top of it instead.