GDU Ninja Update 41 - Low Inventory Closeouts

We strongly recommend that all our customers use 'Low Inventory Close outs' for OTA (Expedia etc) channels. This is a neat somewhat hidden feature on our system that will greatly reduce the chance of an overbooking.

How does it work?

When your room availability goes down below a pre-defined number of rooms remaining, then we can AUTOMATICALLY close out certain OTA's (Online Travel Agents) automatically. For example we can set the system so that when you have just one room left, some or all of all your OTA's are closed except your most popular one.

Why do I need it?

In the last 12 months we have recorded 30 THIRTY 'outages' with the OTA's we connect to. To be clear, these are outages on the OTA’s own systems, not GuestDiary.

GuestDiary properties never know about these outages because we work hard to develop routines and procedures to smooth out these issues, for example we even have mechanisms to download missed bookings during any outage.

One of the more common issues we are seeing is an OTA 'booking delivery outage' that sees a delay between when a booking is made on an OTA and when it is sent to GuestDiary.

This means we cannot reduce the inventory on the OTA’s fast enough and there is a small risk of an overbooking.

Even without these OTA outages, it is theoretically possible for someone from Australia to book the very last room at the same time as someone from Canada, if booked within the same few minutes on the OTA channels.

What are we recommending?

Use the settings available in GuestDiary to close out most of the OTA's when your rooms are nearly sold out. So if you are down to you last available room for example, then our system can close most if not all OTA’s to prevent overbookings.

Can I override this setting?

Yes, if you are feeling fully confident that you won’t get an overbooking, you can of course 'override' the closeout settings and push that last room out for sale again on the OTA channels.

How do I know if this is already setup?

On the Dashboard page of GuestDiary System you will see a chart (see below). In this example the property has elected to closeout Expedia and Airbnb when they have just 2 rooms left (below 3). This property has elected to do this when they have 2 rooms left because they are close to an airport and are susceptible to a large volume of last minute bookings if a flight is cancelled.

How do I get this setup?

Send an e mail to info@guestdiary.com if you would like to have this setup.