3 Annoying Ways to Get Double Bookings Even If You Use a Channel Manager or CRS.
Most channels managers or distribution systems say double bookings are over with them, it’s not 100% true
As most know, having a distribution system manage rates and availability to sales channels will cut down on mistakes and over bookings drastically or around 99.99% but there’s always a few that cannot be stopped and it annoys everyone in the industry.
1. Guest books on 2 separate channels
Imagine you have 1 room left for New Years Eve 2020, the guest looking at the hotel actually wants to book 2 rooms. So instead of looking for another hotel they load up two Online travel agent websites and make the booking at the same time and click book exactly the same time!
Result = Overbooking
Prevention = Can’t prevent this unless you only give last room availability to 1 channel
Pain Factor = High (OTA have strict clauses that the hotel will pay full commission to OTA and pay difference + taxi to guest for finding new hotel room)
Note: It’s also possible for 2 different persons to coincidentally book the same time also, rare but it happens. Generally this case there’s a few minutes between them.
2. Original missing errors
It is a weird title but it means that the distribution system doesn't recognise the booking as they don’t have the original. This means if someone cancels or modifies a booking the system will ignore it because it never had the original booking. Sometimes it causes panic and false alarms and sometimes overbookings.
This happens a lot when you change system so all future bookings would essentially be original missing bookings.
Prevention: Distribution system should pull all future bookings when connecting the channel
Pain: Huge pain and makes people not wish to swap systems. PMS that onboard new clients will face this issue constantly.
3. Take offline booking in PMS minutes before Online booking arrives.
If someone is calling to book that last room on Saturday night you can bet someone is looking to book it online also!
This is a similar race condition problem that happens when people book on two different sales channels.
Some older systems have rules for their own benefit that might make this problem much worse, the leading channel managers today have rules like this:
- Only tell us about updates every 2 minutes
- We take 1–3 minutes before telling channels per update
- Updates might be broken into per month updates so12 months might take 12 x 3 minutes = 36 minutes.
Typical Scenario: Take Booking and channels gets update about 0 availability after 3-5 minutes. Plenty of time for overbooking!
Prevention: Everyone in the chain needs to be super fast at their job to cut down on this problem.
Conclusion
I hope that was interesting and maybe good to point the hotelier to this blog post if your PMS suffers an overbooking from this scenario.
For Channex we can help drastically reduce these overbookings by having sub second updates to channels without any delays and also import bookings from the channels we connect.
For more information : https://channex.io/
