Overbooking in general
Channel managers, direct channels and apaleo synchronise booking availability every few minutes. This means that theoretically there is a potential for being over-booked during those minutes.
All reservations that were successfully made through any channel and that have caused a conflict (over-booking) will be displayed with a red warning.
To avoid these conflicts you can proactively make rooms unavailable for bookings. For example: You have only 3 of your 200 rooms left available for a certain period of time, and you decide to keep 2 of these rooms bookable only for your front desk and not have them available 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 'auto-replenishment feature'. This feature automatically puts already sold, but cancelled rooms back in the availability and offers them for sale again.
If a reservation for a room is cancelled, the availability of that category in the PMS will increase by one anyway and apaleo sends an availability for that room to the channel manager.
If two systems (the PMS and Booking.com) manage the availabilities, this can lead to errors and overbooking.