Overbooking means selling more rooms than the actual number of rooms available in the hotel. Overbooking is one of the tools for hotel revenue management.
How overbooking works
To manage availability, go to “Room management” → “Availability” → “Calendar” tab. If you work in TL WebPMS or your TravelLine extranet is integrated with another PMS, “PMS availability” or “WebPMS availability” columns are included into the table.
The table works as follows: “Online availability” column shows the minimum value between the two columns - “Default availability” and “PMS/WebPMS availability”.
Example: 24th January, “Standard with balcony”, PMS availability = 8, Default availability = 9. Online availability shows 8 as PMS availability is less than default availability.
“Overbooking” allows selling more rooms of a certain room type than available in the hotel. When PMS runs out of available rooms, the number of rooms that you set in “Overbooking” column will become available for online sales.
For example, if “PMS/WebPMS availability” shows 0 rooms or less and “Overbooking” value is 1, 1 room will be available for sale. The rooms added to “Overbooking” column are available for sale when the value in “PMS/WebPMS availability” column is 0 or less than 0.
Once the room is booked, the overbooking value changes to 0. If the reservation is cancelled, the overbooking value is not automatically increased by 1 after cancellation.
To enable overbooking, send a request to the TravelLine customer support.
How to add rooms to overbooking
To set overbooking:
1. Go to “Room management” → “Availability” → “Calendar” tab and find “Overbooking” column.
2. Click the overbooking value and set the number of rooms for sale beyond availability.
To set overbooking for several dates or several room types, click “Group operation” button:
set the period to add the rooms for;
select “Overbooking” in “Parameter” field;
set the number of rooms for sale beyond availability in “Value” field;
tick the room types to increase availability for;
click “Save”.
If you need to set the overbooking value to all the future dates, go to “Default availability” tab and set the value in “Available overbooking” column.
