An overbooking means you have more bookings than rooms. A negative inventory in the Calendar shows an overbooking; a positive or 0 inventory means there is none. You also see a warning in Potential Issues on the Dashboard and under Support.
Common causes
Overbookings are rare. When they happen, common reasons are:
- You manually added or uploaded a booking although there was no availability.
- A channel accepted an online booking although there was no availability at the time of booking, for example because:
- you have contracted rooms or a base allocation with the channel, or
- the channel ignored the channel manager updates because of an error. See Warning channel update failure.
Each overbooking needs to be investigated individually. Send Beds24 a support ticket with the booking number that caused the overbooking.
Overbooking protection
Beds24 recommends setting Overbooking Protection in Settings > Properties > Rooms > Setup to Property. Availability is then calculated from both the total bookings in the room, up to the room quantity, and the total bookings in the property, up to the total rooms in the property.
This means the room closes if the number of bookings in all rooms of the property is greater than or equal to the total number of rooms in the property. This can happen because of an overbooking in a different room.
Note: Hidden rooms aren't included in the calculation of property availability.
Multiple bookings in one unit
Two bookings in the same unit of a room type aren't an overbooking: there are still enough rooms of the type on each night. To reassign them, see Potential Issue: Multiple Bookings in Unit.