Sometimes its possible that, due to the connection of many systems and the speed at which bookings are coming in on a busy period, the hotel or a room type gets overbooked.
The Property Management System (PMS) is connected to a Channel Manager (CM), and we update every 2-4 minutes the rates/availability and pick up bookings from the CM. It possible that also the CM has some delay to the OTA's, or the OTA's are slow to update.
How to find out what the cause was of an overbooking.
Check the PMS
- Open the Reservations Report
- Select to see bookings by creation date, and select the date on which you saw the overbooking come in.
- Export to excel
- Put a filter on the Arrival date column, so that you can filter them out by latest bookings made
Besides this, you need to also review cancellations that came in, as they open the availability.
- Open the Reservations Report
- Select to see bookings by "Cancelled On" date.
- Export to excel
- Put a filter on the Arrival date column, so that you can filter them by the arrival date on which the overbooking occured
Compare these 2 reports to understand step by step which booking came in at what time, when there was a cancellation, and whether the last bookings that came in were done by a Channel Manager or an employee at the hotel.
If the overbooking happened due to a few minutes delay between all the connected systems, unfortunately there is not much we can do. If you see that the bookings came in with a difference of more than 8 minutes between them, then we can take the next step and check with the Channel Manager what happened.