New System Front Desk Professionals Have Been Waiting For
Hotel-Overbooking.com was launched this month and is a new B2B tool for hotels to help them to relocate overbooked hotel rooms.
London, December 18, 2014 (Newswire.com) - Hotels overbook their rooms on a daily basis, resulting in guests with confirmed reservations being told that there's no room at the hotel. Front Desk staff all over the world know and fear the scenario of having to walk a guest to another hotel. Dealing with overbooking situations is stressful and hard work. Calling hotels in the area to find alternative & comparable accommodation, negotiating prices and room releases, holding rooms, calling back, etc is very time consuming and has a high cost in people-hours. And what if most hotels in the area are full as well?
Now enough about the problem – let’s talk about a solution.
Hotel-Overbooking.com is a new B2B tool for hotels to help them to relocate overbooked hotel rooms. It functions as a bidding platform where overbooked hotels can create relocation requests – and other hotels in the area with available rooms can bid on these overbooked rooms.
It works pretty simply: The overbooked hotel sets search parameters such as minimum star rating, maximum distance and minimum guest satisfaction (taken from review & booking sites) of the hotels to be notified. All hotels matching these criteria will receive a notification and an invitation to bid on the available rooms (either by accepting the targeted price or by giving their counter-offer). The overbooked hotel can compare the offers and decide which to accept (if any). If one offer is picked, all details of the alternate hotel are revealed and both hotels can finalize the transaction. That’s it - an alternate hotel was found at no extra cost (to relocate guests is completely free) and with no hassle!
This website is also great news for hotels with available inventory to sell. They can keep track on overbooked rooms in the area and bid on other hotels’ walked customers. This will bring some last minute bookings, increasing their revenue and occupancy. In some cases, hotels find themselves overbooked by so many rooms that they are forced to start walking guests in advance. A great and easy way to get rid of empty rooms – and this at a low commission (hotels winning the bid pays a 10% commission to Hotel-Overbooking.com).
The website was launched this December with initial focus on London, where all hotels are invited to sign-up for free. Expansion to other markets in 2015.