Mistakes are a part of what makes us human beings. Every hotelier must have encountered the dreaded double booking scenario at least once during their tenure, no matter how attentive they are or which hotel management software they use.

If you suddenly find out that you’ve booked more than one group for your property, and now you’re frantically googling how to fix the issue — don’t panic. It happens. You’re not the only one out there making these mistakes.

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In this article, we’ll guide you through what double booking is, how to resolve such scenarios and steps you can take to avoid it in the future. Let’s dive in.

This Article Covers:

• What Is Double Booking?
• What Causes Double Bookings?
• Consequences of Double Bookings
• How To Handle Double Bookings
• How To Avoid Double Bookings
• Role of Software
• FAQs
• Final Thoughts

What Is Double Booking?

Double booking is the term used for situations when you book the same time slot or room for two different customers. It’s the kind of mistake that’s easy to make but has long-reaching consequences.

Customers often make prior bookings and appointments to avoid the last-minute hassle, and double booking makes them face the very thing they want to avoid. On the business side, it not only complicates daily operations but also puts a major dent in their reputation and goodwill.

What Causes Double Bookings?

“How does double booking happen?” You may ask. Many factors play a part in a hospitality business’s booking and reservation workflow and can cause a booking conflict, such as:

Human Error

Human error can creep into your workflows if you’re over-reliant on manual processes. Today, there are multiple channels to market your rooms online, and keeping a record of each appointment from all channels is an error-prone task.

Staff Miscommunication

Another major cause of scheduling conflicts is lack of internal communication. For example, if your front desk gets a walk-in appointment and fails to notify your sales team operating on digital channels, the stage is set for a double booking mishap.

Lack of a Central Booking System

Listing your property on multiple channels increases its exposure and visibility to a larger audience. But without centralized booking management software, it can add to the complexity of your daily operations and lead to errors.

For example, suppose a traveler books your unit via Airbnb, and the reservation doesn’t get reflected on other OTAs. In that case, you may have other travelers booking the same unit on the same date but from other channels.

Inaccurate Calendar Setup

Another reason could be that you’re using separate calendars for direct and third-party bookings, which are not in sync. For example, a customer books a room through your website, but the information doesn’t get updated on third-party reservation calendars. This leaves the door ajar for other travelers to book the same room via third-party OTAs or global distribution networks (GDS).

Late Check-out or Early Check-ins

Don’t get us wrong. Guests love and appreciate flexible rules that can accommodate early check-ins and late check-outs. But to offer that extra convenience, you must be careful about handling your reservations.

Sometimes, there are overlapping reservations for the same room when you allow a guest to check in early or check out late.

For example, a guest notifies you that they might arrive earlier than scheduled, but previous guests occupying the same room won’t be checking out before the usual time. In such cases, if you aren’t careful and agree to the arrival, your front desk may face an awkward situation early in the morning.

Hosting Long-term Guests

Accommodating long-term guests at your property is a great pricing strategy to cut operational costs and maximize occupancy. But the problem arises when long-term guests aren’t sure about the duration of their stay at your property.

In this scenario, you may not want to unblock the calendar while they’re undecided, and also not miss out on bookings if they decide to leave early. Situations like this are a breeding ground for errors and booking mistakes.

Suppose you unblock your calendars and accept a booking only to find that your long-term guest has decided to extend their stay. Now you’ve two parties at your property, neither of which is sure about where they’ll stay overnight, and both are unhappy with your decision-making and booking management skills.

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Consequences of Double Bookings

Double booking is not only frustrating for guests but can add to your business expenses. The highest cost is negative reviews your guests will leave online about their experience at your hotel, affecting how people view your business.

Other than that, most popular OTAs charge cancellation penalties and hold you responsible for relocating guests to another location. Let’s take a quick look at various penalties for duplicate bookings in popular OTAs:

Airbnb

Airbnb has the strictest cancellation policy, so you should be wary of these things:

• You’ll have to pay a host cancellation fee that they deduct from your next payout. You have to pay $50 if you cancel a week before check-in and $100 if it’s less than seven days before check-in. (Note: Airbnb waives off cancellation charges if you’ve had ten consecutive bookings without any hiccups.)
• Upon cancellation, Airbnb will leave an automated review on your public profile. Of course, you can comment on the post and explain your reasons to mitigate the reputation damage.
• Once you cancel a reservation on a particular date, you won’t be able to book anyone else through Airbnb for that date.
• The gravest consequence of double booking and cancellation is losing your “Superhost” status for an entire year.

Booking.com

Booking.com takes a guest-centric approach in dealing with double bookings and owner cancellations.

• You’re responsible for relocating your guests to a similar or better room/property.
• If you don’t have extra rooms, the support team will assist you in relocating your guests to the nearest available facility.
• You’ll have to cover travel expenses for moving your guests from your property to the new one.
• If there’s a difference in rate between the new property and the one that your guests initially booked, then you’re responsible for covering the differences.
• The platform decreases your owner ranking.

Expedia

The biggest problem with canceling a reservation on this OTA is that your quality score and ranking will take a major hit. This score can affect your business’s visibility to future guests and travelers.

You’re also responsible for relocating canceled guests to a similar property. If you delegate this responsibility to Expedia, they’ll explicitly define the cost on a one-off basis. They don’t have transparent pricing policies for relocating canceled guests.

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor has the most distinct cancellation policy out of the lot.

• Each cancellation negatively affects your ratings and decreases your chance of getting future bookings.
• They’ll charge a cancellation fee that you need to pay immediately. Otherwise, TripAdvisor won’t cancel the booking.
• TripAdvisor takes charge of relocating canceled guests to a suitable location and uses the cancellation fee to cover expenses.

As you can see, the monetary implication of canceling a reservation due to double booking isn’t too big on any platform. But repeat the mistake twice or thrice, and the OTAs will ensure your rating is adversely affected, reducing your reservations from their channel.

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How To Handle Double Bookings

Now that you know what double booking is and how it can affect your business let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of solving an unintentional double booking scenario without ruffling too many feathers.

Keep Calm

The first and foremost step is not to panic. Chances are your guests are also losing their heads due to this last-minute change. You can feel upset, frustrated or annoyed, but don’t let it get to you.

How you deal with this negative situation and how efficiently you resolve it is all that matters. Reassure your guests that you have everything under control and focus on finding a realistic solution that suits all parties.

Be patient with your customers, explain the situation, provide them with a tentative solution and ensure they don’t feel neglected. Remember, guests will only get bothered if they find something fishy or you are not trying your best to solve the problem.

Review Inventory Availability

Check if other rooms are available on your property on a specific date. If you have low-quality accommodation, communicate that to guests and offer them concessions, discounts and other services to compensate for the dip in quality.

If the room is of the same quality but requires housekeeping, you can request your staff to prioritize that room. You can entice your employees with free lunch, extra time-off or bonuses. But if they can’t, don’t hold any hard feelings; accept it and move on to the next step.

Evaluate Your Options

If you’re certain you can’t provide accommodation to both parties, it’s time to look outside for possible solutions. But firstly, you need to decide which guest gets the reservation and which one gets relocated to an external property. Consider the following questions carefully:

• Who made the first reservation?
• Does any of the parties have a time-sensitive obligation?
• Have any of the parties booked a service exclusively available at your hotel?
• Did you take advances or deposits from any party?
• Did the party book through your website or an external channel? (It’s better to give precedence to the party reserved through your website because it reassures guests of your website’s legitimacy and allows you to take assistance from OTAs for guest relocation.)

Once you’ve got a clear idea of who you’re relocating, consider the consequences of canceling their reservation. Contact the OTA’s support team, explain the situation and try to minimize damage caused by the cancellation.

Inform Customers

Once you’ve decided, it’s time to let the guests know. Think of the quickest way you can contact them because most people prefer bitter truths over sweet lies. Inform them about the situation, offer maximum visibility into the relocation process and be sure to ask for their confirmation to avoid further misunderstandings.

You can also offer them some incentives to soften the blow like:

• Discounted rates for the relocated accommodation.
• Complimentary add-on services.
• Special coupons for their next visit and more.

All in all, resolving double bookings is more about minimizing the damage and less about undoing mistakes. If you or your staff double book a room or a property, the best thing to do is keep a level head, determine alternatives and figure out a solution that doesn’t leave a sour taste in the guest’s mouth.

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How To Avoid Double Bookings

Prevention is better than cure. We recommend proactively preventing double booking situations rather than running around looking for fixes after making mistakes. Here are a few tips to help you avoid double bookings:

• Ensure that your availability data is in sync across all channels.
• Set up automation or create checklists to ensure you and your staff update the availability status after accepting a reservation.
• Create a centralized calendar using Google Calendar. Integrate it with external modules like reservation software, front desk modules, OTA calendars, CRM and shared calendars under one roof for easy trackability and spotting discrepancies.
• We all know manually managing reservations is especially tricky when using multiple channels to market properties. You can use a channel manager that centralizes every property listing and lets you track and edit them from a unified dashboard.

It’s important to note that most OTAs, GDS and listing channels confirm a booking instantly when a guest books a stay and don’t give enough time to reject a booking. So you must have accurate availability data across channels 24/7, or you risk double booking your units.

Role of Software

To simplify your reservation management workflow, you can either opt for a full-fledged hotel management software or add a channel manager to your existing software stack. With a channel manager, you can:

• Update Inventory and Rates in Real Time: Define custom rules to automatically update inventory, availability and pricing across every marketing channel. Connect the channel manager with your CRS to send automated reservation updates to the front desk.
• Create Pooled Inventory Systems: Pool your portfolio into one bucket and distribute it to every OTA, GDS and ILS. Automatically reflect changes and edits made to the pooled inventory on all channels in real time.
• Avoid Manual Errors: Prevent double booking, overbooking, underbooking and every other manual error-related shenanigans. Save valuable person-hours and provide accurate information to guests by automating processes.
• Increase Operational Efficiency: The platform lets you measure channel performance by tracking engagement, click-through rates and abandonments. You can tweak marketing efforts, negotiate commissions and update business strategy according to trends and performance.

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FAQs

What is overbooking and how is it different from double booking?

Overbooking is a strategy of selling more rooms than you have available in your inventory. It can happen accidentally due to de-synchronized tech stacks or deliberately to ensure full occupancy and avoid revenue loss due to cancellations.

Many small hotel chains and motels do not take deposits or payment advances while accepting reservations, leaving them helpless during last-minute cancellations. They don’t have much ground to enforce their cancellation policies. To tackle this problem, some hotels adopt the overbooking strategy prevalent in the airline industry.

The primary difference between double and overbooking is that the former is predominantly unintentional, and hotels don’t have pre-planned strategies to tackle the situation. In contrast, overbooking is a well-thought-out strategy that requires tie-ups with local hotels having similar quality rooms so you can relocate guests in case of full houses.

When is it acceptable to double book?

Although the hospitality industry sees double booking as a negative thing, other service-based industries use it as an effective strategy in certain circumstances such as:

• Group Appointments: In a classroom or an online seminar, you discuss things that apply to everyone in a group and the size of the group doesn’t matter. Consequently, you can book more than one client for the same time slot as long as you can accommodate them.
• Overlapping Services: A common example is a hair salon where you can book two clients for hair coloring. After coloring the first customer’s hair, you can attend to the second client during a 20-30 mins waiting period when the color sets in. The only thing you need to be careful of is not to compromise the promised quality in order to accommodate multiple clients.
• Multiple Staff Members: A bike repair shop can book multiple clients for the same time slot as they have various mechanics. But there’s also a chance of double booking the same mechanic for different clients in this case.

In a nutshell, double booking is only acceptable when you have the intention, staff, accommodation and strategy in place to fulfill multiple orders and reservations. Otherwise, we advise avoiding such situations and being alert while taking appointments/bookings.

What is a channel manager?

A channel manager is a platform that lets you efficiently market properties on multiple channels. You can centralize listings from every channel and track and edit postings from a unified dashboard. It’s the singular source of reservation data and automatically syncs availability and pricing across every channel, helping you avoid double and overbookings.

What is a central reservation system?

A central reservation system (CRS) is a platform used to manage bookings coming through multiple channels and distribute accurate inventory details to personal websites, travel agents, channel managers and online travel agencies (OTA). It helps hotel managers centralize booking management, streamline operations, increase revenue and improve customer experience.

What is the difference between a channel manager and a CRS?

The main difference between a CRS and a channel manager is how they function. A CRS helps centralize booking information from multiple online and offline channels such as guest details, booking date, booked room and additional purchases.

On the other hand, a channel manager focuses on managing and editing outgoing information like room details, descriptions and pricing.

How can I pick the best channel manager and CRS?

Like any other software, there isn’t a perfect channel manager or CRS that can suit every type and size of business. There are many options in the market based on features, marketing channel integrations and business size.

You must identify your unique requirements, prepare a budget and choose software that ticks all the boxes without going over your budget. To simplify the process, SelectHub has devised a nine-step process called lean selection that ensures you identify your unique requirements and pick the ideal platform that fits your operations.

You can also use our managed selection service for a more personalized recommendation.

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Final Thoughts

Hotel managers must know how to handle double bookings to avoid awkward situations and keep customers happy and coming back. If you double or overbook clients by mistake, always communicate the problem, apologize and look for a solution. Guests appreciate the honesty and the effort to find a speedy resolution.

To avoid such muddy waters altogether, you can consider channel managers that automatically sync accurate availability information across channels and prevent double bookings.

Do you think you’re well equipped to handle a double booking scenario? What steps do you take to avoid these mistakes? Share your experiences in the comment section below!