What is a Double Booking?
When you hear "double booking", you can probably think of several examples of duplicate reservations from your own experience. The tourism and leisure industry relies on booking systems that are not always digital or connected to one another. As a result, the same museum ticket, guided tour slot, or workshop place can end up being sold to two different customers — or even more. This becomes especially problematic for activities that require a limited number of participants or limited resources.Take a cooking class capped at 12 participants: if 2 extra places have been booked, your group suddenly grows to 14 and you may not have the space or supplies to accommodate everyone.
But how does a double booking happen? Double bookings occur when reservation systems are not connected to each other and availability is not updated in real time. For example, customer A might book 4 places on your website, but if your availability is not synced in real time with an activity platform such as Viator or Get Your Guide, those 4 places will still show as available. Customer B can then book the same 4 places. You're now overbooked by 4!
And the more platforms you sell your tours and activities on, the greater the risk of double bookings. You'll constantly have to chase each platform to keep calendars and availability in sync. Managing that risk will drain your energy and eat up an enormous amount of time!
What are the consequences of double bookings?
Double bookings inevitably blow apart the rules you set for your tours and activities — such as a guided tour or a creative workshop. You'll find yourself with larger groups than planned, which creates logistical headaches as well as a poorer customer experience.If you've promised your customers groups of no more than 12 people, they won't be happy to find themselves in a much larger group. As a result, some won't hesitate to leave negative reviews on review sites, particularly TripAdvisor or your Google Maps listing. A double booking can cost you your reputation, on the simple matter of organisation alone.
If you spot the double booking before the activity date and manage to contact customers in time, that's hardly better. Customers won't understand why you're cancelling a booking they made without any issue. The result: frustrated customers left with an unpleasant feeling that they've wasted their time with a disorganised — or even dishonest — operator.
The consequences can be even harder to manage if you offer multiple tours on the same day at the same time. Without a unified booking system, you risk ending up with customers spread across 2 different tours, even though your intention was to offer a wide choice of dates and times while closing duplicate slots as bookings came in. It's a smart strategy for maximising sales, but it carries a very high risk of double bookings.
Ultimately, double bookings will cost you money and time. You'll have to cancel the duplicates, explain what happened, issue refunds, and create credit notes for your accounts. And if you employ other guides, the knock-on effects are even more time-consuming and draining. The tourism and leisure world is unpredictable enough without creating extra obstacles for yourself!
Managing bookings manually on a calendar is the leading cause of errors and duplicates — especially when that calendar is shared among several people responsible for updating reservations as they come in.
How can you avoid duplicate bookings?
If you're reading this, you're just a few clicks away from the solution! Our Explorates booking system lets you manage all your bookings in one place, stress-free and error-free. You keep your own website and continue selling on Viator and Get Your Guide, but all the technical management of availability, pricing, and reservations is centralised through Explorates.In practice, it's very straightforward: customer A purchases 4 places on your website and, within seconds, those 4 places are removed from sale on Viator and Get Your Guide. Conversely, if customer A cancels all 4 places — or just 2 of them — the cancelled places instantly become available again on Viator and Get Your Guide. There is no longer any risk of duplicates!
How does it work? Explorates is connected to your website, Viator, and Get Your Guide, and as soon as a booking is made on any one of them, it is automatically reflected across the others. To do this, Explorates relies on a close partnership with Viator and Get Your Guide, who grant us access to their API. In technical terms, Explorates acts as a Channel Manager, managing all your sales channels in one place.
Contact us today to request a demo and see exactly how the system works. We can also offer you a trial period to get familiar with our platform. Say goodbye to double bookings!
