double booking

[Paul-And-Sharon2]

Hi all, I have a booking for a one night stay. The problem is that that night is already reserved on booking.com. I have my calender synced correctly. when I look at both calenders the blacked out dates correspond. Not sure what to do I have to go with the first booking.

[Pat271]

1) Turn off instant book either until you get a handle on the syncing quirks, or permanently

2) Call Airbnb, explain what happened, and beg them to cancel without penalty. They might do this as a one-off. Not sure how Booking.com would deal with it if you called them.

3) Until you figure out what’s wrong, always check your other platforms before you accept an Airbnb booking.

[Tim-and-Holly0]

@Paul-And-Sharon2 
We tried booking.com a couple years ago but had to cancel almost immediately. Two of the three bookings we received from them were for dates that were already booked. I confirmed the dates were not available on the calendar, but guests still  placed reservations. 

[Normen0]

I had a very similar experience. I do not like Booking.com platform and canceled as well.  

[Paul-And-Sharon2]

what did you do to solve the problem?

[Amanda660]

I’ve been in a similar diary situation with booking.com a couple of times before

but the other way around - the Airbnb bookings were in the diary first. 

How  long has the older booking been in the diary and for how many nights?  

Generally if you call booking.com and explain the clash they’ll cancel for you and the dates won’t be blocked.  I absolutely hated doing it but the diaries didn’t synch

and I didn’t have much choice. 

[John2406]

@Paul-And-Sharon2 When I first joined Airbnb I had exactly the same problem, and it was at that stage that I discovered that it's not so much who booked first, so much as being with Airbnb means that as far as they're concerned, a booking on their platform takes precedence over any other booking for the same dates.

That was a very steep learning curve, but once resolved (I had to cancel the other booking, even though it had come through seconds before Airbnb's own booking) that turned out to be the first and last occasion we ever had such a double booking!

@Pat271 has all the right things to do, whilst @Tim-and-Holly0 kindly highlighted what can happen on other platforms/calendars.

@Paul-And-Sharon2  I hope you manage to resolve the situation without too much upset.

[Susan990]

Can you show us what that looks like on your ABB pages?

[Nanxing0]

This is a common issue I have heard from my friends a lot. Basically the issue is that none of the sync algorithm is perfect. At the very least, any sync function has some sort of delay -- you cannot expect the websites to sync their calendars every second -- so if one platform has a date booked, it will take some time (anywhere from minutes to days) for it to be registered on the other platform. So within this time, double booking can certainly happen. And I have personally found that guests do search for same days at the same time for events so this happens pretty often. 

Solution? At least keep instant booking off on one platform (usually the platform that makes you less bookings). When there's a request coming in, you need to manually check the other platform if the nights are available. If so, you accept it and immediately block the nights on the other platform. I know it's a PITA to operate in this way but it's probably the best solution I can think of.

[Paul-And-Sharon2]

Thanks for all the really good advice it has been very helpful. I have resolved the issue thanks again. Our bnb is very isolated [ 30mins for bread and milk] so it was great for us to feel we were not on our own when an issue came up. So thank you again air bnb community.

[Ryan2352]

Do you use a property management system to sync the calendars or do you use ABB's calendar sync?  Both can take up to an hour to update (without an API connection).  I've not had double booking issues and I'm on a half dozen sites or more.