Overbooking, is a situation in which a tourist object sells more accommodation than it has rooms.

Why and when overbooking occurs?

Generally speaking, there may be three reasons: human factor, a concious decision or an  accident.

The human factor is first and foremost all errors that employees of departments responsible for receiving reservations make. It may be caused by lack of communication between front-desk department and sales department - for example when there was a large group reservation (blocking most -or even all - the rooms) and there was not enough time or there was no information regarding rooms closure. Another mistake also falling into the category of human factor will be an incorrect setting of availability on many booking portals. Booking for a given date falls from the A and B portal, exhausting accommodation in the facility, and the lack of blocking on subsequent websites with the possibility of booking results in the fact that the C portal also enters the reservation for a specified (sold out already) date.

However, it is possible that some hoteliers allow overbooking on purpose (second reason - concious decision) Thus in order to maximize hotel's profits and minimizing possible no-shows or allowing the rule "who's the first ten better" thus allowing double-booking of the same room. We won't comment the legimitacy of this decision as it is a subject of a whole new topic.

The random factor it may sound funny, but some certain chain of events may occur in the property that no one from the crew could have foreseen. For example, when a previous Guest made a serious damage to the room and it had to be put out of service and no other room was available at a given time. Also, there may have been a flood (caused by sewers malfunction), fire, thunder strike etc.

What happens to a hotel Guest in case of overbooking??

If it appears that the all the rooms were sold out, the situation can be resolved in two ways:

1. In case the particular standard of room was sold, for example a standard double, hotel owners are obliged to make a free-of-charge upgrade into first available room for a whole period of time.

2. In case of fully occupied hotel and no rooms available, - Guest should be transferred to the facility (hotel) with a similar (not worse) standard in a closest location. It is necesarry the hotels has no worse standard, it can be equally high or provide higher standard of accomodation. Furthermore, hotel owner should cover all extra costs Guest had to incur - like transfer to another place or paying extra charge for a room in another hotel - price for room in another hotel might have been higher, thankfully, this is not Guests concern. This is especially important for Guests travelling without a car.

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