If a double booking appears

Цей контент ще не доступний вашою мовою.


Why	Settle a “one room sold twice” situation in a couple of minutes — without canceling either booking.
Who	Front desk staff and hotel administrators.
What you’ll get	Both guests keep their stay: the conflict is found on the grid, and one of the two bookings moves to a free room of the same type.
Limitations	The move goes to a free room of the same type; there is no separate “relocate” action in the booking card. Double bookings are rare — this article is for the day one does happen.

Prevent it in the channels — Double bookings: prevent and resolve. Resolve it in the calendar — this article and the overview The Planner: how it works.

A double booking is an accidental sale of the same room twice: for example, a channel sold the room at the very moment the front desk placed it.

Such collisions are rare, but they can’t be ruled out entirely — which is why a sale beyond availability doesn’t go unnoticed: the conflict surfaces for handling right on the Planner. This article covers how to spot it and resolve it.

Both bookings in a conflict are real, with live guests inside. That is why the cure is not cancellation but a move: one of the two relocates to a free room of the same type.

How to spot a double booking

The conflict shows on the calendar grid through two signs:

One date, one room — two bars.
The room’s row is framed in red. In the calendar legend (“On-bar icons”) it is listed as the “Overbooking” alert — “a red frame around the row”.

The frame marks the whole room row, not a single date, so the conflict stays visible even on a busy grid. What makes a conflict is the date overlap: two bookings for one room on non-overlapping dates are perfectly normal, not a double sale.

Each booking’s source is visible on its bar as an icon — “Direct (at the desk)”, “OTA channel”, and others — but the signs of a conflict don’t depend on the source. A glance is enough: the red frame stays in sight as you scroll the grid, so a double booking never hides in the system until the guest arrives. A good habit is to look at the grid in the morning, before the day’s check-ins begin: a conflict found early is resolved without a guest standing at the desk.

The red frame is not the only alert in the legend: next to it live “Unpaid” and the booking status icons. If you haven’t studied the legend yet (“On-bar icons” on the calendar panel), take a look — in a minute it teaches you to read the grid.

Where a double booking comes from

Almost always, from a race: a channel sold the room at the very moment the front desk placed it in the PMS (or a second channel sold the same room at the same time as the first). Availability for all channels is computed from a single PMS calendar, and every sale recalculates it everywhere — the typical cause of double bookings goes away. But a simultaneous sale across different systems is always possible, so such a pair goes to handling: the system’s job is for no guest to end up without a room.

It is a collision of two sales, not a mistake by a particular person: at its own moment, each of the two systems honestly believed the room was free. There is no one to blame — just move one of the bookings. The other side of the story is equally honest: the system doesn’t hide the collision — it shows it on the grid and gives you the tools to resolve it.

Resolve the conflict on the calendar

Open the Planner in the left menu (the “Main” section) and find the row with the red frame — that is where the double sale sits.
Click the conflict — the list of conflicting bookings opens.
Pick the booking you will move: it relocates to a free room of the same type, and the other one stays where it is. How moves work — in Move a guest to another room.
If you’d rather pick the room yourself — booking card, “Rooms and guests” tab, “Change room type and room”: in the “Room type and room” drawer choose the “Category” and a free “Room”, then “Save”. This is an ordinary move: the dates and guests stay put, only the room changes.
Check the grid: every booking has its own row, and the conflict is closed.

One caveat: channel bookings — when manual moves are switched off for them — don’t move by mouse and open straight in the booking card. That is how the system guards against falling out of sync with the channel, so for a channel booking the button path is the main one.

Free rooms of the same type are visible right on the grid: switch on “Prices in cells” — free cells will show the price and the number of free rooms for each date, and picking a room for the move becomes a one-glance job.

Result: after the move, every guest has a room of their own again, and both bookings are alive — nothing to cancel or recreate.

The guest is at the desk: the conflict surfaced at check-in

The most awkward turn of events is seeing the double sale when the guest is already in front of you, waiting for the key. It is the same conflict as covered above — only with a guest at the desk, so the priorities change: first the room and the check-in, the post-mortem later. Work in this order:

Move one of the bookings to a free room of the same type — “Change room type and room” in the booking card, “Rooms and guests” tab. The room type stays the same, so the guest keeps the room type they booked.
Check the guest in as usual: the “Check in” button in the row of the “Bookings” list or in the booking card — then confirm the operation in the “Check into room …?” dialog with “Save”. Several guests in the booking — check them in one by one: every guest in the room block has their own “Check in” and “Check out” buttons.
From there, the usual check-in order applies — it is covered in Check-in and check-out.
Check the grid: the conflict is closed, and every booking has its own row.

Result: the guest at the desk checks into a room of the same type, the second booking stays in force — nobody is canceled or dropped from occupancy. On the grid the conflict disappears, and the second guest, if they are reachable, keeps the very room they booked.

If there are no free rooms of the same type for the guest’s dates, the solution goes beyond this article — you will have to work it out on the spot, with the guest. The frame tells you where the problem is; the choice is yours.

How to keep it from happening again

Double bookings are born in the channels — and that is where prevention lives. The channel manager keeps availability for all channels in one calendar: every sale recalculates it everywhere, and the typical cause of double bookings goes away. No system can rule out collisions entirely, but the risk can be driven down to a minimum: a proper channel connection and room mapping do their part. How it works — in Double bookings: prevent and resolve.

If a channel does sell a room that is already gone, the booking is not lost: it reaches the system — without an assigned room — and waits to be handled on the calendar. The resolution is the same as in this article: a move to a free room of the same type.

Sync runs on its own: there is no separate “send to channels” button — price and availability flow out to the connected channels without a manual push. The front desk doesn’t have to think about the channels: the grid and the channels live in one calendar. Conflicts are rare — and that is the single calendar’s doing, not luck.