13 years
It's difficult... are you using any kind of property management software?
This thread is interesting, if you haven't seen it.
Dealing with overbookings on HW and HB
Front Desk Operations
We are listed on several hostel booking websites and occasionally we cannot fulfill every request we receive. It just seems a little strange to me that there is no easy way to say sorry we overbooked our rooms on these sites. I try to keep our calendars updated all of the time, but this is not always possible. I try to email the customers and work something out in the event that this happens, but I think there needs to be a better way of handling this kind of situation. Surely, if the hostel ends up being booked, that they could put their deposit towards another place. How do people deal with this?
- Comments
13 years
Yes, that is interesting. We are doing everything manual for now. Most of our bookings come directly from our website, which of course we want to encourage. The problem I see is that there of course going to be times when we are busy and we will get overbooked. When this happened with HB they refunded the money to the customer. HW said it is against the agreement and even though we are already full we need to provide accommodation to the customer. If you are full, how can you do this? HW could at least provide a credit for their next booking. Since the deposit people pay with HW is quite small, I get the impression that they don't care too much if they don't show up. From our own website we charge a 50% deposit through Paypal and so far (from January) we have had only one "no show".
Anyway, the thing I really wanted to know was how do other people handle overbookings from HW and HB?
13 years
I doubt that many hostels would have this problem. Either they use some kind of software to manage their availability automatically, or they would just have beds available one one channel only. So say one 6 bed dorm on hostelworld and another on hostelbookers. Obviously you need to have enough rooms to be able to do this. Personally we have beds on HW only and our website uses the HW engine. Thus whenever a booking is made then the bed is taken off all our availability, and overbooking is impossible, as we use BPO one the front desk, so a booking is taken off the system whenever a phone booking is taken. I realise there are a lot of hostels that use 5 or upwards booking channels, but I imagine they are probably in the cities - we found even HB drove very few bookings out here.
Personally I think the issue of overbooking is a real problem if it occurs - when customers book on any site like that they are told they have a confirmed booking and the deposit has been taken. If they are then told in fact they don't have a booking they will be justifiably upset. If it was me I'd reduce the listings on sites like HW or HB until it was an impossibility to overbook.
13 years
HW said it is against the agreement and even though we are already full we need to provide accommodation to the customer. If you are full, how can you do this?
I think it means that the property has to work out accommodation for the guest, even if the hostel has to pay the difference for a room at another property.
The property has to login to HW, HB, and all the other booking engines and reduce availability every time the property gets close to being full. It can be incredibly tedious. I'm not sure if there is an easier way other than getting software to automatically update availability...
13 years
I find it safer and less stressful to close the booking engines when the hostel is near to capacity. The last beds can then be given to "walk-ins" as necessary.
13 years
I'm facing a dilemma myself as I don't know if I want to juggle hostelworld, hostelbookers, email bookings, and walk-ins. In the end, I'm not sure it's worth the trouble and I think I'm going to either limit booking sites to just HW and then manually update when there are email reservations and walk-ins.
I've also considered splitting up the rooms and putting some on HW and some on HB, but again, this is a bit of trouble and might end up being confusing. I guess the bottom line is--is it really worth being listed on hostelbookers and other online booking sites other than HW? I suppose it depends on the size and type of your property as well as how much competition you have.
13 years
First of all..YOU MUST NEVER OVERBOOK. The bookings are confirmed, and the guest must be able to book with the absolute knowledge that the bed will be available when they arrive. It is up to you to make sure the beds are removed from the booking engines when there are none to sell. Yes it is difficult, and yes it is tedious, but it is part of the process now, and you have to do it.
The way we do it is to allocate most of our beds to Hostelworld, and then only when you are 100% sure they will be available, throw some at Hostelbookers. Currently any other booking engines are probably not worth the effort, although you could use myallocator.com if you want to use more, which makes it a little bit easier.
The important thing, though, is that I check it regularly. Actually 2 of us check it regularly. I've actually become a bit addicted to it, and check it every couple of hours, usually just adding beds to Hostelbookers as they sell.
I guess our big advantage is we use BackpackOnline from Hostelworld, so the Hostelworld part of it is automatically synced with walkins and email bookings, which we process immediately. As Scotch Argos said, most bookings come from Hostelworld anyway. We also use their booking engine on our website.
In the rare event we screw up and have overbooked, we consider it our responsibility to get the guest accommodation which is better than ours, at no extra cost to them.
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