Overbooking for OTAs

Overbooking for OTAs in case of non continuous availability

Let's consider the following scenario, where there are 2 rooms available for each date from 1st to 6th.

But none of the rooms have a continuous room availability from date 1st to the 5th.

Room 101 is available on 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Room 102 is available on 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 Room 103 is available on 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 Date wise availability:

On the 1st date, the total number of available rooms: 2 (102, 103) On the 2nd date, the total number of available rooms: 2 (102, 103) On the 3rd date, the total number of available rooms: 2 (101, 103) On the 4th date, the total number of available rooms: 2 (101, 103) On the 5th date, the total number of available rooms: 2 (101, 102) On the 6th date, the total number of available rooms: 2 (101, 102) On the 7th date, the total number of available rooms: 3 (101, 102, 103) OTAs or Channel managers only accept date-wise availability so consider minical sends above date-wise availability to an OTA (Where all dates have at least 2 rooms available).

Now consider we receive a new OTA reservation from 1st to 5th, and miniCal tries to allocate a room for it from 1st to 5th. Although there are rooms available on all dates, there is no single room available that has continuous availability from the 1st to 5th date range. miniCal handles this scenario in the following way: If the feature-setting "Allow OTA Bookings With Non-continuous Rooms/blocks" is enabled, miniCal would create a split booking. For a booking ranging from 1st to 5th, will split into two blocks. The first block will be placed in room 102 for range 1st to 2nd and the second block will be placed in Room 101 for range 3rd to 5th. If the feature-setting "Allow OTA Bookings With Non-continuous Rooms/blocks" is disabled, miniCal would place this reservation on the first room found for a specific room type. That would make this reservation show as an Overbooking. Although this can be easily managed by the hotel by moving bookings around the calendar. As shown in the next image.

The chances of these overbooking issues can also be minimized by setting an OTA CloseOut Threshold to 1 or more for all room types on the Inventory page. This will allow miniCal to close inventory when the availability reaches the threshold and avoid the chances of non-continuous or overbookings.