Are you facing reservation challenges such as overbooking, doublebooking, or underbooking? These issues can harm your hotel's reputation, lead to unhappy guests and lost revenue.
It's important to understand the root causes and solutions to these challenges.
This blog will explain overbooking, double booking, and underbooking, and focus on how a channel manager can help prevent these problems.
What Is Hotel Overbooking?
Hotel overbooking occurs when more rooms are sold than available in your inventory. While it can help ensure occupancy by covering for no-shows and cancellations, if all guests show up, you’ll be left without rooms. This leads to dissatisfied guests, negative reviews, and potential penalties from booking platforms.
What Is Double Booking?
Double booking happens when a single room is booked by more than one guest, often due to booking channels not being synchronized. This creates confusion at check-in and can result in angry guests and negative reviews.
What Is Underbooking?
Underbooking happens when not all rooms are made available across all platforms, leading to unsold rooms and missed revenue. It often occurs when inventory is split between different channels, making it seem like the hotel is fully booked on some platforms when rooms are still available.
How to Avoid Overbooking and Double Booking?
Manual task handling can often lead to overbooking, double booking and underbooking. Here are some ways to prevent these issues:
Use a Channel Manager
A channel manager helps synchronize room availability across all booking channels in real-time, ensuring that all platforms show the same room availability and preventing double bookings.
Monitor Booking Channels in Real Time
With a channel manager, all bookings from OTAs, your website, and even walk-ins are consolidated into one dashboard, allowing you to manage reservations from a single interface and reduce human errors.
Automate Rate Updates
Channel managers also automate rate and availability updates, eliminating manual processes that often lead to overbookings. This ensures consistency across all booking platforms.
Set Buffer Room Policies
During busy seasons, it’s smart to keep a small number of rooms unsold as a buffer for last-minute cancellations or unexpected arrivals. This can help prevent overbooking.
Streamline Front Desk Operations
Well-trained front desk staff and streamlined operations ensure any last-minute issues, such as guest complaints about overbooking, are managed smoothly.
Benefits of Using a Channel Manager to Prevent Overbooking
- Real-Time Updates: Ensures all channels reflect accurate room availability.
- Centralized Inventory Control: Manages all booking platforms in one place.
- Improved Guest Experience: Fewer mistakes lead to smoother check-ins and satisfied guests.
- Revenue Optimization: Prevents overbooking and underbooking, maximizing room sales.
Time to Choose the Best Channel Manager for Your Hotel
With a few clicks, AxisRooms' channel manager can update your hotel’s inventory across all channels. Sparing you the trouble of hotel overbooking, double booking, and underbooking our channel manager can simplify your hotel’s operations and boost your sales.
You just update one room rate, and our channel manager will take care of the rest. It will automatically update the pricing for all of your hotel rooms and rate plan combinations.
Overbooking, double booking, and underbooking are major challenges that can damage your hotel’s reputation and affect profitability. However, with a channel manager, you can automate inventory management, reduce errors, and prevent these issues. Adopting modern tools will help you enhance guest satisfaction and optimize your hotel operations.
Consider AxisRooms' channel manager to streamline your booking processes and safeguard against reservation errors. Request a demo today to discover how we can improve your hotel’s booking management system.
Read Also: 8 Hotel Distribution Management Mistakes to Avoid