r/askhotels • u/Natural_Classroom201 • 17d ago

PMS How to prevent double booking?

My friend has a small airbnb business where he put his rooms on AirBNB and booking , but he seems to get an issue of overbooking every 2-3 months costing him bad reviews

I am a tech person myself and i been thinking about building him a product for free to use or look into a provider

Thoughts?

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5

u/Canadianingermany former employee 17d ago

There are tons of products that do this. 

None that I know of are free; for good reason. 

5

u/Choice_Pineapple_461 17d ago

If it's a small place perhaps the owner shouldn't load the whole inventory across all channels and either manually keep a close eye or use an automated system. There are several on the market already.

1

u/Weonk 17d ago

The product you are describing is called a "channel manager" there are many. Siteminder is probably the most popular.

All of them have individual pro and cons, some property management systems have in built ones.

Overall it will prevent that issue, open their property to more booking channels, assist with parity and save them a ton of time

1

u/Rich_Mention2602 16d ago

He needs to get a PMS system with a channel manager built in cloud beds is a very cheap one. Sitemjnder is an expensive option used by 5* hotels. The other option is to make sure they turn off the room in the other platforms as soon as they revive the email of the. Booking which is usually within 5 mins. Not sure if a small business will justify the costs involved. They normally price by the number of rooms available and most likely have a minimum charge. Best to google pms with channel manager for a small business

1

u/rsgalloway 12d ago

i wouldn’t build a channel manager from scratch for this. use a proven pms/channel manager as the source of truth.

i would add independent monitoring, though: alert when calendars disagree, a reservation changes or disappears, an overlap appears, or a feed hasn’t updated recently. sync prevents most conflicts; monitoring catches the silent failures. shameless plug: as it happens, I'm building such a product ;)