WB Knowledge Base - How can I manage pending bookings or overbooking situations?

A reservation without an assigned room or an alert in the system does not necessarily imply overbooking or an error. At ZaK, these situations can be due to various scenarios, so it's important to differentiate between pending reservations, discontinuous stays, and overbookings.

What is a pending reservation?

A pending reservation is one that doesn't have a physical room assigned. The reservation blocks availability (since the room type is known), but an alert ("Assign a room") will be displayed in the Planner, and the reservation will be visible transparently.

Pending reservations can have different origins, one of the most common being discontinuous stays.

What is a discontinuous stay?

A discontinuous stay occurs when there is availability for the entire reservation period within a room type, but not in the same physical unit.

In other words, the system detects general availability, but cannot automatically assign a specific room for the entire stay.

These reservations are always pending reservations, with the difference that they do not appear in the Planner (or in zView). However, the corresponding alert (“Assign a room” + “Discontinuous stays”) will be displayed.

This scenario does not necessarily represent overbooking, but rather a need for manual intervention in organizing the accommodation schedule.

What is overbooking?

An overbooking occurs when there are more confirmed reservations than available units for a type of accommodation on one or more dates.

Unlike discontinuous stays, in this case there is not enough actual availability, even by reorganizing reservations without changing room types.

Where can these situations be observed?

ZaK offers several sections to identify these situations:

In Home > Deserving attention, you'll find alerts related to pending reservations, discontinuous stays, and overbookings (among other notifications) when they affect dates within the next 7 days.

In Reservations > Overview, you can view a complete list of these situations (and more) from the current date onward, with no time limit.

These tools allow you to detect and prioritize the necessary actions according to the urgency of each situation.

How to act in each case?

Pending reservations for discontinuous stays

In most cases, these situations can be resolved by manually reorganizing existing reservations. This involves:

Reviewing the current room allocation in the Planner.
Relocating existing reservations within the same room type.
Relocating existing reservations within the same room type.
Once the reorganization is complete, the reservation can be correctly assigned and will no longer be pending.

Discontinuous stays cannot always be completely avoided, but maintaining an organized Planner is the most effective way to prevent them.

Pending reservations (other cases)

If the booking does not correspond to a discontinuous stay, the following is recommended:

Verify actual availability for the reservation dates.
Check for any blocks or restrictions.
Evaluating external solutions based on the establishment's operations.
Manually assign the reservation to the corresponding physical room.

Overbooking situations

When an actual overbooking is confirmed, operational actions will be necessary, such as:

Relocating reservations to other available room types.
Managing manual changes to room assignments.
Evaluar soluciones externas según la operativa del establecimiento.
Analyzing the origin or cause of the overbooking if corrective actions are required.

Main causes of overbookings

Using a management system is essential for organizing accommodations, but it doesn't guarantee the complete absence of unintentional overbookings. Some of the most frequent causes are:

Use of the Availability Modifier.
Deletion of physical rooms or room types from the system.
Use of Superproducts.
Errors in product mapping in the Channel Manager.
Creation of two or more bookings simultaneously (or within minutes of each other) from different platforms.
Channels that are not updated due to pending update errors.
Manual cancellation or editing of OTA bookings in ZaK, which causes calendar desynchronization.
Outages in the OTA.