Here’s the scenario: An OTA (like Booking.com or Expedia) sells a room at your property for 3 nights and leaves a note that says “Room was not able to be assigned.” You’re frustrated because you’re thinking “If there isn’t a room, then why did you sell it?!” Now you have to do some serious shuffling to hopefully be able to accommodate this reservation.
Here’s what’s happened: The way all OTAs communicate is that they see room nights, not room numbers. Imagine each room type is a bowl of M&Ms and each night is a separate bowl. OTAs look at your Property Management System (PMS) and see 1 last M&M in the QQ (room with 2 Queen sized beds) bowl for three consecutive nights, picks each of them up and sells all 3 to the customer. The problems is that each of those room nights is in a different room number. That’s why the computer couldn’t automatically assign a room. Theoretically if unassigned rooms are assigned regularly by hotel staff, then these reservations can still be accommodated even if it involves a little last minute shuffling.
Practically we know it doesn’t always work that way due to special situations like Groups reservations being blocked together, people requesting a specific floor, view or even room number which keeps hotel staff from moving them.
Some strategies that can help with this:
- There are likely some functions that can be turned on in your PMS that help rotate the usage of rooms and strategically offer the best suggested placement for guests. This tightly places together the various lengths of stay like a game of Tetris. It also helps keep available room nights grouped together in the same room number rather than having single nights stranded by themselves.
- The best strategy involves effectively withholding rooms. Withheld rooms are rooms that your PMS doesn’t let the OTAs see. If you keep having problems with QQ rooms which you have 20 of, then you might raise your withheld room count to 3 instead of 1. This means once you sell 17 QQ rooms, then when the OTAs look at your PMS they will see that room type as sold out and you have a 3 room margin to sell yourself or use for shuffling. (Warning: you have to have a healthy balance by withholding as few rooms as possible. Every room you withhold can’t be seen on the internet or sold on the internet. Also, sometimes people see your room on the internet, then call directly. Withholding rooms also negatively affects this Billboard Effect.)
Why rooms oversell and how the different computer systems communicate to each other is very technical. If you’re having problems with this or just have questions about how the whole system works please send me an email at Ask@BransonMan.com and I’ll be happy to correspond with you.