Are you finding it difficult to handle reservation challenges such as hotel overbooking, double booking, and overbooking?

For many hotels, managing reservations can be a real challenge. Hotel overbooking, hotel double booking, and underbooking can all be caused by poor reservation management.

Booking management challenges are a guaranteed way to cause your revenues to slump. As a result, visitors can seek out other hotels for future vacations due to unhappy guest experiences.

It also makes you suffer from several other collateral damages, such as bad reviews and ratings on online platforms. Such negative impressions can drive potential guests away from your hotel.

In order to avoid complications caused by poor booking management, it’s essential to understand what each type of reservation challenge means. 

In this blog, you’ll discover the different categories of reservation complications and how to tackle them with an all-in-one solution. 

What Is Hotel Overbooking in the Hospitality Industry? 

The phenomenon of selling more rooms than you have available in your hotel inventory is described as hotel overbooking in the hospitality industry.

Many hotels resort to this strategy to ensure occupancy since they do not want to lose revenue due to booking cancellations or when a guest fails to check-in, resulting in no-shows.

Overbooking in hotels occurs for a couple of reasons. Hotels are overbooked inadvertently when all reservation channels are not synchronized or purposely as a strategy to ensure occupancy and avoid losing revenue.

When a reservation gets cancelled due to overbooking, online travel agencies provide guests with alternative accommodations at the same rate and in the same category. 

They might also upgrade guests to a premium hotel room to compensate for the inconvenience. In such cases, online travel agencies levy a penalty fee that might reach $500. And if there are several such occurrences, a hotel could suffer a significant loss that would have a negative impact on its profitability.

This is a major setback that requires to be acknowledged and addressed!

Moreover, if all the confirmed visitors arrive, hotels could be in a very tough spot to manage and accommodate since they would be out of rooms. This would lead to a poor and undesirable travel experience and negative customer reviews and ratings.

Moreover, if all the confirmed visitors arrive, the hotel will be in a very tough spot to manage and accommodate since they will be out of rooms. This would lead to a poor and undesirable travel experience and negative customer reviews and ratings. 

Such reviews can influence how potential guests consider your hotel. Even if the booked room is unavailable and you are compelled to turn away a guest, it will cause a great deal of displeasure.

What Is Double Booking in the Hotel Industry? 

In a hotel, a double booking occurs when the online channel through which guests book their reservation registers multiple bookings erroneously. This phenomenon can occur if you don’t have a quality tool for automating bookings and updating inventory across all online channels.

When a guest arrives at your hotel only to discover that their room has been offered to someone else, they can be justly outraged. And dealing with an angry or upset customer is not an experience that any hotelier desires. 

Can you guess the outcome of this entire fiasco? 

The unhappy customer will probably go online and write a negative review about your hotel. And you know, online, every review matters. One single bad review can overpower 100 good reviews. It can have a ripple effect on how customers perceive your hotel.

What Is Underbooking in the Hotel Industry? 

There are instances when hotels might try to prevent double reservations by issuing separate allotments for each distribution network. 

In this scenario, the same room cannot be marketed more than once, resulting in a vacant, unsold room. One channel’s inventory may be sold out, leading potential visitors to look elsewhere, while other channels still have vacancies.

Guests who are unaware of the other channels can mistakenly believe that the hotel is filled to capacity. This will cause them to search for another hotel in the same vicinity using the same channel they were already using.

Now that you are aware of the major booking complications, it’s time to find out how to deal with them.

How Can Overbooking and Double Booking Be Avoided at Your Hotel?

Irrespective of how hard you try to avoid making errors, things can get out of control every once in a while. Your hotel might end up getting overbooked, or double booked, and sometimes even underbooked.

This problem typically involves inventory management, which cannot be resolved until you have a technology to manage the channels where your hotel rooms are listed automatically.

But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

We’ll help you find the right channel manager so that all of the rooms you have listed will be visible in real-time to potential guests and booking agencies. As a result, the risk of a double reservation is drastically reduced. 

A channel manager will ensure that your hotel’s reputation will not be tarnished, and you will not have to deal with unsatisfied clients.

What Is a Channel Manager?

A Channel Manager is an advanced tech solution that streamlines hotel operations and makes the jobs of front-desk managers easier. 

A channel manager is a one-of-a-kind software application that does everything from real-time updating of room prices and availability to handling multiple rate types. It also organizes bookings into a single dashboard. 

It is particularly designed to meet the commercial demands of hoteliers, and it gives a single interface for successfully managing all reservation channels.

Apart from reservation management benefits, a channel manager offers several other advantages for you, your hotel, employees, and customers.

Benefits of Using a Hotel Channel Manager

Here are nine amazing benefits of using hotel channel manager software that prove it to be a powerful tool in the hotel industry:

• A channel manager allows you to see all of your reservations at once. All of your reservations from multiple online travel agencies can be booked, rejected, or reviewed in one place.
• Overbooking would be effectively avoided with the help of the channel manager. All listings accurately reflect room availability thanks to real-time updates via a central administration system.
• A channel manager oversees and automates all bookings. Guests can pick hotel rooms of their choice, order specific services and enquire about additional advantages. 
• With the aid of a channel manager, guests can also complete the transaction without contacting anyone personally. This feature significantly accelerates and streamlines the reservation experience.
• By monitoring and analyzing the channels where your rooms are listed, a channel manager provides you with accurate data about which ones are profitable for you. 
• It also enables you to have the authority to update your hotel’s marketing activities, negotiate incentives with existing channels, and terminate partnerships with those that do not benefit your business.
• You can use a channel manager to update your hotel’s inventory across major online travel agencies and reservation channels. As a result, your hotel’s online presence in a global market increases, as does hotel sales revenue.
• A channel manager also eliminates the need for traditional and manual hospitality booking systems such as walk-ins or phone calls. It is possible because a channel manager efficiently streamlines and automates reservation procedures. 
• A channel manager also enables guests to book rooms independently and provide relevant data about themselves and their travel plans.

Time to Choose the Best Channel Manager for Your Hotel

With a few clicks, AxisRooms‘ channel manager can update your hotel’s inventory across all channels. Sparing you the trouble of hotel overbooking, double booking, and underbooking, our channel manager can simplify your hotel’s operations and boost your sales.

You just update one room rate, and our channel manager will take care of the rest. It will automatically update the pricing for all of your hotel rooms and rate plan combinations.

You can request our channel manager demo, experience our quality services, and see for yourself.