11 years
If they are decent, they will contact the hostel and say: please cancel. Does the hostel then have to call up the HWorld tabulation and manually add back the unwanted beds?
If you pull up that guest’s reservation in the Inbox or BPO and click the ‘Cancel’ button you will be asked if you want to reallocate those beds to HW for sale again. Without cancelling the reservation HW’s system won’t let you sell those beds again because it thinks they are already booked.
A corollary of this occurred to me. If there is no commitment to pay something, a nuisance-maker could make a sequence of fictional bookings, and in the process deplete the hostel's vacancies so that it appears full and other people cannot book anything! Does this sort of thing ever happen with bookings?
As you said, people who don’t pay anything when they book have no commitment, so they don’t feel any need to show up or tell you if they need to cancel. This is one of the most frequent complaints with Booking.com. Many people use the site to get accommodation confirmations for visas for exactly that reason and then cancel them later. I haven’t heard hostels complaining about malevolent guests or their competitors intentionally blocking their inventory to reduce their sales, but it would certainly be possible.
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