How to avoid double bookings on Airbnb, Booking.com and MakeMyTrip

Why double bookings happen

A double booking is two guests holding the same room for the same night. Booking.com's partner data, quoted by Hostaway, says at least a quarter of hosts get one in their first year (Hostaway). In Indian homestays the causes are usually:

1. Bookings outside the booking sites. A call, a WhatsApp message or a walk-in guest is promised a room that nobody marks on Airbnb or Booking.com.
2. Two people, two notebooks. The owner and the manager each say yes to a different guest.
3. Slow calendar sync. Calendar (iCal) links refresh on each site's own schedule. Airbnb reads outside calendars roughly every two hours, and some sites wait up to a day (Almenrausch).
4. Whole-house and room listings. The villa is listed whole on one site and by the room on another, with nothing linking the two.
5. Holds that never expire. A room is "kept" for a guest who never sends the advance.

Seven fixes

1. Use one calendar as the master. Every booking, from every source, goes into the same calendar before you confirm it. A shared booking calendar beats a notebook because everyone sees the same thing.
2. Lock nights, not just dates. Your system should refuse a second booking for a room that's already taken that night. InnRow does this even when two staff save at the same moment. See how room locking works.
3. Connect every booking site both ways. Paste your master calendar's link into each site, and each site's link into your master calendar. See calendar sync help.
4. Never connect two booking sites directly to each other. Linking Airbnb to Booking.com and Booking.com back to Airbnb can create loops. Connect each site only to your master calendar.
5. Link whole-unit and room listings. If the villa is booked, every room in it must close, and the other way round.
6. Give holds an expiry. Hold a room for 24 hours while the guest pays the advance, then release it automatically.
7. Close by hand for same-day bookings. When you take a booking for tonight or tomorrow, close the dates on the booking sites yourself, because sync may not have caught up.

If a double booking happens anyway

1. Decide which booking stands: usually the earlier one.
2. Call the other guest at once. Apologise and offer an equal or better room nearby, at your cost if needed.
3. Ask the booking site's support to cancel without a penalty and explain what happened.
4. Find the cause (manual entry, sync delay, unlinked listing) and fix it so it doesn't happen again.

Double booking or overbooking?

They sound alike but aren't the same:

• Double booking is an accident: the same room is sold twice for the same night, usually because two calendars didn't agree.
• Overbooking is a choice some large hotels make: selling more rooms than they have, expecting a few cancellations and no-shows.

Overbooking can make sense for a 200-room hotel with steady no-show figures. For a homestay or small hotel it rarely does: one walked guest is a large share of a small property's reviews. Small properties are better off making double bookings impossible and protecting themselves with a clear cancellation policy.

When you need more than calendar sync

If you sell on five or more sites, change prices several times a day or get many same-day bookings, a two-way channel manager pushes changes in seconds rather than hours. Read iCal sync vs a channel manager.

Questions people ask