How To Deal And Avoid Overbooking At Your Hotel?

Posted by mycloud Hospitality on October 31st, 2019

The goal of every hotel operator is to run their hotel operations efficiently and to get tons of happy and returning guests. But in reality, every hotel face difficulties such as overbooking and each hotel operator will try to avoid it. It leads to loss of guest dissatisfaction and a bad hotel reputation. Here is how a hotel software can help you to avoid issues related to overbookings.

Let’s first understand what is overbooking?

Overbooking has been around for a long time and it's utilized by revenue managers in wide range of business. In the hospitality industry, overbooking is a standard practice. As a hotel operator accommodation property will sell all the rooms to get maximum profit. But what if certain rooms because of maintenance issue or some people book your hotel and never show up?

Without an efficient overbooking strategy your property can lead to revenue loss.  A Hotel Management system and its automated online booking software can help youin such situations by keeping a track of reservations and collecting online payments immediately. So in case of a no-show, at least you can get retain some revenue as cancellation fee. Normally, when you purposely overbook your property, you can make a list with all check-ins and ensure guaranteed bookings. Likewise, you can also check with nearby accommodation properties for vacant rooms with similar amenities and quality so in case you’re sold out you can send your guests there.

Use Channel Manager to avoid hotel overbooking and distribute inventory

It is a hectic task to manually update inventory on different OTAs. Wrong inventory details on OTAs will put your hotels at a high risk of overbooking. A best hotel management software and its integrated channel manager will automate the process of updating inventory across all OTAs in real time. Hence OTAs know how many rooms are left to sell and save valuable time and avoid overbooking at your property.

More direct online booking from your hotel website

Hotel website is a boon for any hotel operator to get commission free booking and also eliminate overbookings. Hotel software will be able to integrate with a website booking engine and Payment gateway which will allow your guests to view amenities and book a room directly and with payment gateway they can collect payment in real-time and the inventory gets updated in the hotel software and guest gets an instant confirmation. Because it’s a direct booking the property can charge a cancellation fee for cancelled and no show bookings.

Make decisions based on the data

If your hotel is overbooking than your total inventory assuming there will be no shows or cancellations. You are risking you are hotel overbooking strategy. To make right decisions you’ll need a reliable data.

A good hotel software will be able to provide deep data-driven insights. By using reports and data you will be able to forecast and plan accordingly. You should use pooled inventory available in the hotel software because you’re booking and cancellation data needs to reflect accurate data in all OTAs, Sites in real-time

Mycloud hospitality provides you the best hotel management software to manage you’re overbookings. You can choose from variety of OTAs and you can use pooled inventory to automate room distribution effortlessly.