How to avoid double bookings when you sell on several sites
A double booking costs you money, a review and a guest. Here is why it happens and how to stop it.
Why double bookings happen
Every booking website keeps its own calendar. When a room is sold on Booking.com, Agoda has no idea until someone closes it there. The gap between the booking and the update is where double bookings live: a few minutes of delay, a forgotten site, or a busy weekend.
The more sites you use, and the fewer rooms you have, the worse it gets. A villa with one unit has no spare room to move the guest to.
Five habits that prevent double bookings
- Keep one calendar as the truth. Never edit availability on individual sites by hand.
- Connect your sites with a channel manager. Updates then happen automatically within minutes.
- Close rooms for everything, not only bookings. Maintenance and owner stays must block the calendar too.
- Check restrictions. Minimum stay and closed-to-arrival rules must match on every site.
- Watch short gaps. One or two free nights between bookings are the easiest to oversell by mistake.
What a channel manager actually does
A channel manager receives every reservation, closes the room on all other sites, and sends your prices and restrictions out. Sojodesk does this for Booking.com, Agoda, Airbnb, Traveloka, Expedia and Google, and it is built into your property calendar so you never edit two systems.
Common questions
How fast are other sites updated after a booking?
Within minutes. The update is sent as soon as a booking is received, and a regular check runs in the background as a safety net.
What if two guests book at the same moment?
It is rare, but it can happen on any system. Sojodesk flags a booking that cannot be placed in a room, so you can solve it quickly, for example by moving a guest to another room of the same type.
See Sojodesk with your own rooms
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