The two overbookings
They are worth keeping apart, because one is a decision and the other is a fault.
- Deliberate: a hotel with a historic no-show rate of 8% can knowingly sell 5% above its capacity. That is revenue management, and it works if you have the data and a plan for when it fails.
- Accidental: two channels sell the last room because the allotment was not updated in time. Nobody decided it: something broke.
Why the accidental kind happens
Almost always for the same reason: there is more than one path for changing the inventory. If OTA bookings take allotment off in one place, the ones the front desk types in another and the ones from your own engine in a third, it only takes one of them to fail — or two to happen at once — for the numbers to stop adding up.
The other cause is latency: if a booking takes minutes to propagate, that window is real time during which the same room can be sold twice.
How to prevent overbooking
- One single pipe: every booking — OTA, manual, group and from your own website — takes inventory off through the same path.
- Check on confirmation, not before: re-reading availability with the row locked at the moment the booking closes serialises simultaneous confirmations.
- Do not sell what you cannot sync: an unmapped room type in the channel manager should not be able to go on sale.
- Watch the pickup: a date that fills much faster than usual is the one worth closing early.
What to do once it has happened
Rehouse the guest in a property of the same category or better, absorb the difference and the transport, and tell them as early as you can. The later it is spotted, the more it costs and the worse the review it leaves behind.