This week’s theme on the Hospitality Blog is overbooking. Here’s an exercise taken directly from my eCornell course Overbooking Practices in Hotel Revenue Management. The overbooking-ratio method is a very, very popular and successful method that many hotels use for their overbooking policy. When you’ve completed this exercise, be sure to download this free step-by-step guide to overbooking. 

Now, sometimes people talk about overbooking as being evil. Why would anyone ever overbook, because that’s not fair to the customer? Let’s think about this. If you never overbook—you say that I’m a good and pure person, and I would never, ever do anything like that—what happens if you have a 5% no-show rate?

You have those rooms sitting there empty—it actually might end up costing you more than if you overbook just a little bit. And so when we try to look at overbooking, we try to come up with the least expensive overbooking policy, realizing that whatever we do with this, we’re still going to be making a guess. It’s kind of like gambling—we’re going to come up with a forecast of how many no-shows, and come up with our best bet on what the overbooking policy should be. So, when we look at coming up with an overbooking policy, there are more than several factors to consider.

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