Skip to content
All the guides

Guide

The double booking, and how to stop meeting it at the door

It almost never comes from carelessness. It comes from a delay — and a delay can be shortened, or watched.

In short

A double booking happens when two guests buy the same night before your calendars have had time to talk to each other. The three causes are always the same: an iCal calendar re-read every few hours, a booking taken by phone and typed in later, and a unit on sale across more platforms than anyone is watching. Rentals Hub flags it the moment it forms, on the calendar and on the dashboard, and offers to move the stay to a unit that is free rather than let it be discovered on arrival day.

The three causes, in order of frequency

They are worth telling apart, because they are not corrected in the same way. Two are about tooling, the third about habit.

  • The iCal delay: the night goes on Airbnb, Booking.com only learns of it hours later, and sells it meanwhile.
  • The late entry: a guest books by phone, and the block is only placed that evening.
  • The forgotten platform: a unit stays on sale on a site nobody has opened for six months.
  • The rare but expensive case: the number of identical units lowered without bringing the already-open dates down with it.

What actually prevents them

No tool can remove the delay of a platform it does not control. What it can do is shorten the window and make the collision visible while it is still repairable.

  • Move to a direct connection where one exists: the window falls from hours to seconds.
  • Type the phone booking in before hanging up, not in the evening.
  • Close the listings you no longer watch instead of leaving them live.
  • Work on one calendar: two open tabs are not an overview.
The direct connections, and what they close

What Rentals Hub does when one happens anyway

A booking that came from a platform cannot be refused: the sale happened whether the night was free or not. Refusing it would make you blind to the problem rather than rid of it. So Rentals Hub takes it, marks it, and leaves the decision to you.

  • The colliding stay carries a red edge on the calendar, exactly where the two stays touch.
  • The dashboard puts it at the top of what needs attention, ahead of an unpaid balance.
  • The Move button offers the units that are genuinely free on those dates, touching neither the price nor the guest.
  • A stay moved by hand is not put back by the platform’s next revision of it.
Seeing the clash on the calendar

When there is no free unit left

This is the case that hurts, and no software solves it for you. What it can do is give you the time to announce it rather than suffer it.

  • Warn early: a guest told three weeks ahead finds something else; the same guest told at the door writes a review.
  • Rehouse the shortest and nearest stay first — it is the one that places most easily.
  • Cancelling on the platform side has a cost — a penalty, a ranking drop — and it differs from one to the next.
  • Write the incident down: three collisions on one unit say a calendar is wired wrongly, not that you were unlucky three times.

Guides

The other guides

Ready to simplify managing your rentals?

Create your account, add a first unit, and feel the difference in the first week.

Create my account

14-day trial · no credit card · cancel anytime