Overbooking

Overbooking is when a property has taken more confirmed bookings than it has units to provide. It happens in two very different ways. Deliberate overbooking is a revenue tactic borrowed from airlines and hotels: knowing a predictable share of guests will cancel or fail to arrive, a property sells slightly beyond capacity so it does not run empty on paper. Accidental overbooking is a failure. It is usually caused by selling the same unit on several channels without keeping availability in sync, so two guests are promised the same site on the same night. The first is managed risk; the second means turning a guest away, which is costly and damaging. For campgrounds, accidental overbooking is the more common danger, because sites and cabins are increasingly sold across a website, OTAs and marketplaces at once. That is exactly why real-time channel synchronization matters.