Overbooking in General
In Apaleo, availability updates happen every few minutes between channel managers, direct booking channels, and Apaleo itself. Because these updates are not instant, there’s a small chance that overbooking may occur if multiple bookings are made at the same time.
If an overbooking happens, regardless of the channel, Apaleo will display a red warning message in the Availability view to alert you.
Preventing Overbooking
To reduce the risk of overbooking, you can manually hold back a few rooms from being sold online.
For example, if you have only 3 rooms left out of 200, you might decide to keep 2 rooms available only for direct, on-site bookings rather than online channels.
To do this:
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Go to your property’s Room Rack.
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Add a Maintenance slot for the rooms you want to block.
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Under Target unit, select the room number.
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For the Maintenance type, choose Out of Order.
This will temporarily remove the selected rooms from online availability.
💡 For more information about maintenance slots, see the article Maintenance Management in Apaleo.
Overbooking via Booking.com
If you notice frequent overbooking from Booking.com, it may be caused by their Auto-Replenishment feature. This setting automatically reopens cancelled rooms for sale, which can conflict with Apaleo’s real-time inventory updates.
How It Works
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When a guest cancels a Booking.com reservation, the available room count increases in Apaleo.
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Apaleo then sends this updated availability to the channel manager.
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However, Booking.com’s auto-replenishment can also reopen the same room on their side, resulting in a duplicate availability update and potentially, an overbooking.
How to Fix It
To avoid this issue, we recommend disabling the Auto-Replenishment feature in Booking.com.
You can do this by:
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Contacting your Booking.com Account Manager, or
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Checking Booking.com’s help resources for steps on disabling Auto-Replenishment.
FAQ
Why did an overbooking occur even though I had availability updates enabled?
Overbooking can happen when multiple systems update availability at the same time.
Because Apaleo, your channel manager, and OTAs (like Booking.com) sync every few minutes, two bookings may overlap before the latest update is processed.
Why am I getting overbooking from Booking.com?
Booking.com uses an Auto-Replenishment feature that automatically reopens cancelled rooms for sale.
When both Booking.com and Apaleo try to manage availability simultaneously, it can lead to duplicate updates and overbooking.
How can I confirm if I have been overbooked?
If the overbooking occurred, there will be a warning message. If there is no warning message that indicates that at the moment of the creation of reservation, availability existed and reservation was possible.