Overbooking in general
Channel managers, direct channels, and Apaleo update booking availability every few minutes. During this update period, there's a small chance that overbooking could happen.
If an overbooking occurs due to reservations made through any channel, it will show up with a red warning.
To prevent this, you can manually make some rooms unavailable for online booking. For instance, if you have only 3 out of 200 rooms left for a certain time, you might choose to keep 2 of them available only for direct booking at the front desk, not online.
- Just head to your property’s Room Rack and Add a Maintenance slot.
- The “Target unit” will be the room number and for the Maintenance type please select Out of Order.
For general information about maintenance slots please see this article.
You are getting overbooked via Booking.com?
Booking.com has a feature called the 'auto-replenishment feature.' What it does is simple: if a booked room gets canceled, this feature automatically makes the room available again for others to book.
Here's how it works: When someone cancels their reservation, the number of available rooms in that category increases by one in the Property Management System (PMS). Then, Apaleo sends this updated room availability to the channel manager.
However, when both the PMS and Booking.com are handling room availabilities, it can sometimes cause mistakes and result in overbooking. This happens because both systems are trying to manage the same rooms' availability.