Overbooking: when two guests hold one room

Booking.com says overbookings usually happen when availability isn't kept in step across the places a hotel sells, or when its calendar and policies aren't set up accurately. Its notes for channel managers list the usual causes:

• A system outage that stops the room count updating.
• A request to close a room that arrives after the booking has been made.
• A rate that isn't mapped correctly between the channel manager and the site.
• A cancelled booking that wrongly puts a room back on sale.

Two more are easy to miss in a small hotel: a phone booking or a walk-in that isn't entered at once, and a room count changed by hand on one site but not on the others.

Some overbooking is on purpose. Cornell University's course on overbooking says hotels can protect themselves against the revenue lost to no-shows by overbooking, and EHL Hospitality Business School calls it a calculated risk, one that becomes a real problem when demand runs higher than expected.

• Booking.com: contact Booking.com, and move the guest to a room of the same or a better standard if you have one. If you don't, it is your responsibility to find the guest accommodation elsewhere, of the same or a better standard, and to cover the costs. Booking.com suggests you organise transport to it as well, or you may have to pay it back later.
• Agoda: offer an equal or upgraded room at no extra cost to the guest. If you have none, find alternative accommodation of an equal or higher standard and provide transport to it at no extra cost, and contact Agoda as soon as possible. Agoda says rejected bookings have costs, set out in its terms in the Partner Portal under “Resources”, then “Terms and Conditions”.
• Expedia Group: you are financially responsible for a relocation. Find a nearby property with an equal or higher Expedia Group star rating, and cover the room, the transport and any relocation fees. If Expedia Group moves the guest for you, you pay back what it spent, at public prices, and Expedia says that doesn't save you money.
• MakeMyTrip and Goibibo: with auto-confirmation, every booking is confirmed at once and must be honoured, and MakeMyTrip tells hotels to manage their rooms and prices in the extranet to avoid overbookings.

Expedia also says relocations within seven days of check-in weigh more against a hotel's guest experience score, and relocations on the day of check-in most of all.

Walking a guest is the trade's phrase for moving a booked guest to another hotel because you have no room. Done early and done well, it costs money but keeps the guest's goodwill.

1. 1Find out early. Check the next few nights' bookings against your rooms every morning, so an overbooking shows up days ahead, not at the desk.
2. 2Look for a room of your own first: an upgrade, a room out of order that can be readied, or a guest who would move rooms mid-stay.
3. 3Choose whom to move with care. A guest staying one night, whom you can reach before they travel, is easier to move than a family arriving late at night.
4. 4Call nearby hotels of the same or a better standard, early in the day, and hold a room.
5. 5Pay for the room and the transport to it, and tell the guest before they set out, with an apology and the new hotel's address.
6. 6Tell the booking site the same day. Booking.com asks for the guest's full name, the new accommodation, the room type and any extra costs.
7. 7Keep every receipt, and invite the guest back on another night.

• Sell through a channel manager, and keep it as the one place you change rooms and prices. Booking.com says to avoid editing the same fields in both the channel manager and the extranet.
• Check every room type and rate plan is mapped between your channel manager and each site.
• Know that a calendar sync isn't instant: Booking.com says updates can take up to two hours to refresh across platforms.
• Enter phone bookings and walk-ins at once, before the guest has the key.
• Decide whether cancelled rooms should go back on sale. On Booking.com, auto-replenishment does this, is on by default for new partners, and is set under “Rates & Availability”, then “Calendar” and “Auto-replenishment”.
• On your busiest nights, keep one room off the booking sites and sell it yourself, at the desk or on your website.
• Compare the rooms sold in your own system with each site's reservations every morning, for the nights ahead.

Overbooking on purpose only makes sense from your own history: how many rooms, night by night, are lost to no-shows and to cancellations too late to resell. Every guest you walk costs a room elsewhere, a taxi and some goodwill, and on Expedia a relocation caused by overbooking counts against your guest experience score.

• Overbook only the nights and room types where your own figures show rooms going empty.
• Count no-shows and late cancellations by night of the week and by booking site, and work the sum out for each.
• Stop once a night is nearly certain to fill with guests who will come, such as a festival or a wedding weekend.
• Have the nearby hotels' numbers ready before you need them.

• Write down why it happened, a mapping error, a room closed too late or a booking entered late, and fix it before the next busy night.
• Answer any review about it plainly: say what went wrong, what you did for the guest and what you have changed.
• Check the next invoices: Booking.com may charge commission on the reservation, and when Expedia Group arranges a relocation for you, its final costs appear on your invoice.
• On Expedia, open the “Visibility performance” page: preventable relocations from the past 365 days count in your guest experience score, and you can report one you think was counted wrongly.