Why has a room or rate been booked for a date that seemed to be closed?

There are two main reasons for reservations coming through on dates when a certain room or rate seems to be closed on your side.

If you closed the booked room/rate only seconds or minutes before you received the reservation, please check the Reservation Timeline to see if the reservation was created before you sent the update that closed the room/rate.

The following timeline shows how a reservation can end up being regarded as overbooking while there was open availability when the reservation was made:

• 09:20:00 Reservation 555 for room A, rate B, date C is made on Booking.com and made available via XML
• 09:20:25 XML update closes room A, rate B, date C
• 09:20:45 Reservation 555 is retrieved via XML; reservation is considered as overbooking for a closed room/rate/date

In this scenario, reservation 555 is incorrectly regarded as overbooking due to the fact that the reservation came in after the room/rate/date was closed.

This kind of cases cannot be ruled out with 100 percent certainty, however it is possible to decrease the probability of the occurrence. The most effective way to achieve this is to increase the frequency of the periodic pull to 30 seconds or less.

If the room/rate had been closed for longer than a few minutes before you received the suspected overbooking, we recommend checking if an existing reservation was modified or cancelled, as this can also trigger auto-replenishment. For more information on auto-replenishment, read our article on how it works.