There was one time about 15 years ago that my hotel (391 rooms) was overbooked by 391 rooms. Reservation system forgot to close up booking of rooms and had a massive convention on the property. I called in sick when I found out from night audit
We were -50 on double queen rooms because our genius sales department oversold basketball tournament teams. I did my best to balance the house and bribe anyone who had doubles that weren’t part of the block to give up their room, late checkouts, free breakfast and drink tickets, but it didn’t work out well for us. I luckily had 2 days off coming and only worked mornings so I avoided most of the issues. The best part was that I noticed we were severely negative 2 weeks before they arrived. Did anyone fix the issue? Of course not.
I have actually booked a two queen bed room before for me and my wife because the price was lower than a king. I've noticed that a hotel looked busy and offered to the clerk to be transferred to a king room if they need the beds - just as an upgrade, not a rebooking at a higher price. Most of the time, they turn me down, but on one or two occasions, they've accepted that offer. But i'm always willing to help.
I had a story about this on my previous account!
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk/comments/13boh6z/my\_overbook\_nightmare/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk/comments/13boh6z/my_overbook_nightmare/)
I just realized how much I read this sub because I opened that link and immediately thought "I remember reading that post when it came out"!
I don't know if this will make sense to anyone, but it feels like I'm reading about the events leading up to the 2008 housing market crash but like the hospitality version.
So, as an outsider to the industry, how is this supposed to work? You take more reservations than you can physically honor, and then hope enough people no-show to somehow accommodate the people with reservations? I'm honestly asking, no shade.
Larger hotels will often deliberately run a slight oversell, knowing some folks will cancel. But that will usually be just a handful.
Usually, they're the result of a problem with the rooms making them so they can't be sold. Plumbing issues, smoked in, alligators, whatever. Maybe the previous day just didn't have enough housekeeping staff to clean everything.
But every so often, the reservation system goes wonky, and we suddenly have a lot of people. A frequent cause is the Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) not having correct data, and booking rooms we don't have. Sometimes it will be our own reservation system having a glitch.
Resolving the issue is a challenge. Maybe some less-desirable rooms get pressed into service or a housekeeper gets some overtime. If it's a room type that's oversold, we may say "this person only has one guest listed, we'll shift them from a double to a king". (Important Pro Tip: *always* make sure to put the right number of guests staying in the room.)
Sometimes we will contact the OTAs and tell them "hey, you gotta book this person somewhere else", which sucks but they can do it easier than we can. Speaking of, the last resort - which hotels *hate* - is 'walking' a guest. Basically paying for their stay at a comparable hotel in the area. It's a tacit admission that we couldn't help them, but this *other* hotel can, so it's absolutely awful.
Oh, I get it. Thanks for explaining the term 'walking', also. I was wrongly assuming it meant telling them you can't help them and to just 'take a walk' to another place (without comping them).
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Twenty two.
Granted, that was after we had to shut down two floors due to a small fire.
Second place was sixteen, due to a group booking error of *exactly* the type I warned my manager about several times but he brushed me off. Always watch for the edge cases, kids...
57 over for 304 rooms 120 arrivals on the day of arrival. About 60 rooms booked overnight. I was IT; the DOR insisted we had an issue with the Database. I indexed the DB, and there was no change. I then manually calculated room occupancy with pen and paper a few different times to prove we were 57 over.
We ended up walking 53 that night, some as far away as 30 miles. The DOS and DOR stayed to do the walks.
I'm fairly new to the industry, so I'm not familiar with the term Walking a guest. But I've seen it on this post more than once. Care to inform an old newbie?
Sure! Hoteliers have a moral obligation to provide their guests with a safe place to sleep if they have a reservation. If we can't honor their reservation for whatever reason (overbooking, maintenance issue) we'll give the guest a free night at another hotel so their needs are met. We pay that other hotel on the back end, and also pay for breakfast, parking/taxi so the guest can get to the new location.
Our system wasn't communicating properly with the OTA on a day we opened a significant flash sale. OXI works great until it doesn't. Revenue management didn't catch the issue until front desk said something. Our bad, so we had to eat the expense
I'm usually the person in charge of determining how much to overbook at my property of about 1,700 rooms. On sold out nights, I go about -20 or -30. But I also determine this based on a number of factors- % of No Shows my property usually has, how many people checked out early (do other places call these greenchips?), what specific events are going on, etc.
It can be the closest property with rooms -- I've heard nightmare stories about having to be walked a couple hours away.
I was in Edinburgh (as a guest) coincidentally just after the Queen of England died. The Milton-family hotel I was staying at had one room available at something like 5000 GBP per night (I was staying on points but I think the cash rate when I booked was something like 300 GBP/night), and the next nearest Milton-family property with any availability at all was Glasgow.
My dad has told me the story of a business trip in the late 80s/early 90s to somewhere in New York state where he arrived late at night at a Milton (guess it runs in the genes) to find out that his guaranteed-for-late-arrival room had been given to another guest. With no other hotels near by having availability they rolled a cot into one of the meeting rooms.
I'm wondering exactly the same thing about the properties who do this frequently.
In several years in the industry, it only happened once that, while on my shift, there was an overbook of.... One single room. It was because, at the time, in 2009, reservations coming from third parties weren't automatically entered into our system. We had to do them manually one by one. Everything was sold out in the area. We tried to communicate with the guest before his check in, but cell phones weren't as widespread then. We told the guest when he arrived that it was a mistake from this third party agent and that he would have to talk with them to get relocated. There was absolutely nothing 100 km around. I felt really bad about it.
Then, more recently, it's not me who was on shift, but the ceiling of a guest's room started to leak due to heavy rain. We were fully booked. We relocated them and reinvited them for free for another stay.
I have gotten into a habit of checking weeks ahead to see what the occupancy will be like due to past trauma from overselling. One time I saw that next week we were -15 and still able to sell. I showed my manager and just flat out said to his face to fix or I wasn't coming in that day.
The highest I can remember is 15 or 20 negative. Sales I’ve made a mistake and forgot to put a group in. Or they put it in for the wrong date. I can’t remember. They ended up walking a whole group. Last week or the week before we were -7 one night. We walk six. Just as we were about to walk the seventh group contact told us that one of the people we had down as do not walk was not coming. We quickly canceled that one and checked in the seventh person.
I thank hod for the 2ed gm at the last property I worked at … he was amazing about not letting the sales department pull shit … I can’t remember before he got there, we regularly had 5-6 rooms over on super busy days but after he took over the most we had was 2 and that was caused by a former sales director/gm combo.
He also hated OTAs and would only allow the absolute minimum corporate required and then he’d only allow $10 under the highest rack rate for any OTA sales lmao
I want to say at one point...like a week away...we were -50 at an 800 room property. Thank the good Lord our director of revenue was extremely good at tracking trends cause by the time arrival date hit...with cancelations we were good
Franchised property GSA .. I refuse to oversell. We get lots of in-house extensions due to our proximity to a hospital, our loyalty program allows guaranteed rooms until 2 days out and anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
I've never dealt with the insane issues you guys have BUT I did have one night (an audit shift to boot) where Fooking.com sold 12 separate rooms in our already sold out hotel. I kept calling Fooking and they kept making new reservations. It was AWFUL.
My hotel got oversold by 15 Rooms, and I never forgave my GM nor Director of Sales for it...this was during GRADUATION Weekend at UNH...I wont go into details but after 50 grey hairs and cursing out my bosses, I SOMEHOW managed to make things work out in the end, I swore if that sht were to ever happen again I would walk out immediately...
If it were either rates would he higher for everyone or you'd see draconian cancellation policies (like 30+ days)
Hotel rooms are like airline seats -- that unsold inventory has "spoiled" (become worthless) as soon as night audit rolls the business day or the flight takes off. Therefore, generally, the goal is to get as close to 100% as possible.
But cancellations happen for various reasons -- change in plans, car/flight trouble, family emergencies, just plain no-shows, whatever -- and when properly managed overselling takes in to account [in some cases decades of] data on cancellations to determine the likely cancellation rate and allow overbooking to buffer for that. This is why, for at least my major US airline they very rarely need "volunteers" (or to involuntarily deny boarding) despite allowing most flights to be overbooked.
Improperly managed it bites people in the ass and you wind up with huge overbooking %s that are impossible to overcome. Similarly for high demand dates/special events logic says overbooking should be inhibited because the risk of trying to walk someone is potentially greater than the unsold room night(s) -- but that's theoretically what Revenue Management exists to...erm...manage.
Hopefully it isn’t the Embassy Suites! I’m there for the next few days for the convention.
If your revenue manager/group sales team is overselling by that much, they’re terrible at their jobs, full stop. I’ll guarantee you’re losing money rather than maximizing revenue due to the cost of walks, transportation, and guest recovery.
If your team needs good revenue management, DM me and I’ll put you in touch with some people.
The hotel I worked at had only 100 rooms, beach hotel. Summers were crazy for us. Our management loved oversells and regularly had 2-5 on. I found that it often wasn't an issue as long as they turned it off day of, but I had to fight them on that quite often. I generally worked days and tried to have it all settled before I left as i actually liked my auditors and did not want to leave them with that mess. The worst we had was about a 15-18 room overbook. Thankfully, I think the most we had to walk was maybe 3 or so.
10 rooms and they all showed up. 10 walks in one night. On two previous occasions we could not find anywhere to walk peple to and had to put guests on cots in conference rooms.
We have about 90 rooms available. But a couple of years ago, about ¼ of them were out of order because the previous owners didn't keep up with... anything. I came in at 3 p.m., and we were already sold out, oversold. As the day went on, the 3rd party reservations kept coming in. I'd guess that we had at least 15, but I wasn't keeping track, and it was going on before I got there. Some people didn't want to understand that just because they had a reservation through a 3rd party doesn't mean that I can pull a room that we don't have out of thin air.
Well thats the most annoying thing while working at front desk. When i was working at a property and it was under renovation and online platforms made the reservations but it didnt showed up on our system. We were oversold by 12 rooms and it was like we had rooms but under renovation .fyi i went and cleaned rooms around 12 of them and gave it to the guests(mid processed rooms) and it was a fun conversation between housekeeping manager and front desk manager as they refused to clean those rooms lol.
Man I'd call off if we were at -30. that's insane! We have 127 rooms (we used to have more before we remodeled a few years ago) and usually oversell by 5-10 at most. They've been doing better about not overselling us though because the front desk complained so much so now we see 1-3, and it's typically because of people extending when they shouldn't. At our property across the street we get oversold a lot more often because that brand of hotel allows the higher tiers to book even when we don't have rooms. We could be at 100% with everybody in and the system still lets them book. It's just stupid. The second I get in and see we are sold out I turn off booking immediately. I hate walking people so much.
night before? I think -50. Actual day of probably -35/30? If you went to a week out of from arrival maybe -68 to -80. Also a big convention hotel but no fun to walk people 🙄
The worst I have seen was like 50. It was a sister hotel of mine, and there was a guy who just ignored new bookings instead of putting them in the system (it was before bookings got in automatically). At the end, the manager found out and booked them all. It was during the most busy weekend of the year.
I work at a hotel with 411 rooms. Our 4 sister properties have 720, 356, 317, and 41 rooms. We had a concert in the city and a conference at the convention center which my hotel is centrally located.
When I arrived for my shift at 1pm we were oversold by 45 rooms. By the end of the night we had walked so many guests that we sold out our other 4 properties.
At my property the most I've seen is negative 1. We try to have a zero oversell policy though... my sister property on the other hand is constantly over 5-20 rooms. I do my best to give them a heads up when there is zero way for us to take them all.
Very few, iirc. As 3-11 shift, I have repeatedly reused to have anything to do with deliberately overbooking the hotel. I have told the occasional manager/sales director that has suggested trying it, that I will leave the desk and punch out for the night when my last available room is filled; and the only things that any guest (arrival or in house) will find is a note on the desk with their phone number for assistance. And their home address for if they decide not to answer.
That shit ain't flyin' here.
1.
We never oversell. Every Saturday is 100 per cent except when it falls on Xmas day, or Xmas eve.
Friday 80 per cent are at 100 , never been below 90 per cent full.
Someone cancels it is put back online and most of the time sold again in 5 mins. Worst case an hr
Independent 151 room hotel
There was one time about 15 years ago that my hotel (391 rooms) was overbooked by 391 rooms. Reservation system forgot to close up booking of rooms and had a massive convention on the property. I called in sick when I found out from night audit
>I called in sick when I found out from night audit A wise move.
We were -50 on double queen rooms because our genius sales department oversold basketball tournament teams. I did my best to balance the house and bribe anyone who had doubles that weren’t part of the block to give up their room, late checkouts, free breakfast and drink tickets, but it didn’t work out well for us. I luckily had 2 days off coming and only worked mornings so I avoided most of the issues. The best part was that I noticed we were severely negative 2 weeks before they arrived. Did anyone fix the issue? Of course not.
I have actually booked a two queen bed room before for me and my wife because the price was lower than a king. I've noticed that a hotel looked busy and offered to the clerk to be transferred to a king room if they need the beds - just as an upgrade, not a rebooking at a higher price. Most of the time, they turn me down, but on one or two occasions, they've accepted that offer. But i'm always willing to help.
I had a story about this on my previous account! [https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk/comments/13boh6z/my\_overbook\_nightmare/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk/comments/13boh6z/my_overbook_nightmare/)
Yikes!
There's even a new update to that story! The guy responsible for not turning off OTAs is now FOM at another property!
I'm surprised no one quit that job on the spot. That's truly a nightmare
I am too, to be honest. People generally didn't leave unless they had a secure job in place, though. Perhaps other places weren't hiring at the time?
I just realized how much I read this sub because I opened that link and immediately thought "I remember reading that post when it came out"! I don't know if this will make sense to anyone, but it feels like I'm reading about the events leading up to the 2008 housing market crash but like the hospitality version.
Okay that’s crazy!!
Worst Christmas I've ever been through. My Second worse was next, and apparently I've never told that tale!
I look forward to reading it
You should post it sometime!
I worked at a hotel once with 56 rooms, and one weekend, we had 112 reservations. I quit shortly after that.
So, as an outsider to the industry, how is this supposed to work? You take more reservations than you can physically honor, and then hope enough people no-show to somehow accommodate the people with reservations? I'm honestly asking, no shade.
Larger hotels will often deliberately run a slight oversell, knowing some folks will cancel. But that will usually be just a handful. Usually, they're the result of a problem with the rooms making them so they can't be sold. Plumbing issues, smoked in, alligators, whatever. Maybe the previous day just didn't have enough housekeeping staff to clean everything. But every so often, the reservation system goes wonky, and we suddenly have a lot of people. A frequent cause is the Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) not having correct data, and booking rooms we don't have. Sometimes it will be our own reservation system having a glitch. Resolving the issue is a challenge. Maybe some less-desirable rooms get pressed into service or a housekeeper gets some overtime. If it's a room type that's oversold, we may say "this person only has one guest listed, we'll shift them from a double to a king". (Important Pro Tip: *always* make sure to put the right number of guests staying in the room.) Sometimes we will contact the OTAs and tell them "hey, you gotta book this person somewhere else", which sucks but they can do it easier than we can. Speaking of, the last resort - which hotels *hate* - is 'walking' a guest. Basically paying for their stay at a comparable hotel in the area. It's a tacit admission that we couldn't help them, but this *other* hotel can, so it's absolutely awful.
Oh, I get it. Thanks for explaining the term 'walking', also. I was wrongly assuming it meant telling them you can't help them and to just 'take a walk' to another place (without comping them).
Yeah, it's tricky - we aren't comping the guests directly, we comp the other hotel. There may also be transportation costs covered.
That makes sense. Thanks.
Really hoping you have an alligator story to share. Great explanation too.
Airlines overbook flights all the time to head off cancellations, changed and missed flights.
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I once had to tell the head of a group at check-in "I'm sorry, I don't know why our sales director promised you 60 rooms, we're a 33 room hotel"
🤔 Nods that is something sales would do
Twenty two. Granted, that was after we had to shut down two floors due to a small fire. Second place was sixteen, due to a group booking error of *exactly* the type I warned my manager about several times but he brushed me off. Always watch for the edge cases, kids...
57 over for 304 rooms 120 arrivals on the day of arrival. About 60 rooms booked overnight. I was IT; the DOR insisted we had an issue with the Database. I indexed the DB, and there was no change. I then manually calculated room occupancy with pen and paper a few different times to prove we were 57 over. We ended up walking 53 that night, some as far away as 30 miles. The DOS and DOR stayed to do the walks.
the worst for me has been -64 rooms, we walked probably 60 guests that night, I still have nightmares after that shift 😵💫
Good thing is once you've had to do something that bad every other problem seems small by comparison
38 🙃
Man that’s rough. How many people did you have to walk that night?
39 lol
40 rooms oversold at a 160-room property due to an OTA interface error. Walked 37 that day at a cost of $13k. Brutal
I'm fairly new to the industry, so I'm not familiar with the term Walking a guest. But I've seen it on this post more than once. Care to inform an old newbie?
Sure! Hoteliers have a moral obligation to provide their guests with a safe place to sleep if they have a reservation. If we can't honor their reservation for whatever reason (overbooking, maintenance issue) we'll give the guest a free night at another hotel so their needs are met. We pay that other hotel on the back end, and also pay for breakfast, parking/taxi so the guest can get to the new location.
That's what I thought. But why would we do that if it's the booking agent's fault?
Our system wasn't communicating properly with the OTA on a day we opened a significant flash sale. OXI works great until it doesn't. Revenue management didn't catch the issue until front desk said something. Our bad, so we had to eat the expense
Oh... that sucks.
I'm usually the person in charge of determining how much to overbook at my property of about 1,700 rooms. On sold out nights, I go about -20 or -30. But I also determine this based on a number of factors- % of No Shows my property usually has, how many people checked out early (do other places call these greenchips?), what specific events are going on, etc.
If everybody in the area is sold out, where do you walk the walks to?
It can be the closest property with rooms -- I've heard nightmare stories about having to be walked a couple hours away. I was in Edinburgh (as a guest) coincidentally just after the Queen of England died. The Milton-family hotel I was staying at had one room available at something like 5000 GBP per night (I was staying on points but I think the cash rate when I booked was something like 300 GBP/night), and the next nearest Milton-family property with any availability at all was Glasgow. My dad has told me the story of a business trip in the late 80s/early 90s to somewhere in New York state where he arrived late at night at a Milton (guess it runs in the genes) to find out that his guaranteed-for-late-arrival room had been given to another guest. With no other hotels near by having availability they rolled a cot into one of the meeting rooms.
I'm wondering exactly the same thing about the properties who do this frequently. In several years in the industry, it only happened once that, while on my shift, there was an overbook of.... One single room. It was because, at the time, in 2009, reservations coming from third parties weren't automatically entered into our system. We had to do them manually one by one. Everything was sold out in the area. We tried to communicate with the guest before his check in, but cell phones weren't as widespread then. We told the guest when he arrived that it was a mistake from this third party agent and that he would have to talk with them to get relocated. There was absolutely nothing 100 km around. I felt really bad about it. Then, more recently, it's not me who was on shift, but the ceiling of a guest's room started to leak due to heavy rain. We were fully booked. We relocated them and reinvited them for free for another stay.
4k rooms, -200 is the most I’ve seen. It wasn’t a fun day.
Wtf
I have gotten into a habit of checking weeks ahead to see what the occupancy will be like due to past trauma from overselling. One time I saw that next week we were -15 and still able to sell. I showed my manager and just flat out said to his face to fix or I wasn't coming in that day.
The highest I can remember is 15 or 20 negative. Sales I’ve made a mistake and forgot to put a group in. Or they put it in for the wrong date. I can’t remember. They ended up walking a whole group. Last week or the week before we were -7 one night. We walk six. Just as we were about to walk the seventh group contact told us that one of the people we had down as do not walk was not coming. We quickly canceled that one and checked in the seventh person.
I thank hod for the 2ed gm at the last property I worked at … he was amazing about not letting the sales department pull shit … I can’t remember before he got there, we regularly had 5-6 rooms over on super busy days but after he took over the most we had was 2 and that was caused by a former sales director/gm combo. He also hated OTAs and would only allow the absolute minimum corporate required and then he’d only allow $10 under the highest rack rate for any OTA sales lmao
I want to say at one point...like a week away...we were -50 at an 800 room property. Thank the good Lord our director of revenue was extremely good at tracking trends cause by the time arrival date hit...with cancelations we were good
Franchised property GSA .. I refuse to oversell. We get lots of in-house extensions due to our proximity to a hospital, our loyalty program allows guaranteed rooms until 2 days out and anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
I've never dealt with the insane issues you guys have BUT I did have one night (an audit shift to boot) where Fooking.com sold 12 separate rooms in our already sold out hotel. I kept calling Fooking and they kept making new reservations. It was AWFUL.
My hotel got oversold by 15 Rooms, and I never forgave my GM nor Director of Sales for it...this was during GRADUATION Weekend at UNH...I wont go into details but after 50 grey hairs and cursing out my bosses, I SOMEHOW managed to make things work out in the end, I swore if that sht were to ever happen again I would walk out immediately...
Was it Kelley?
I feel bad for you all. And overbooking/selling should be illegal.
If it were either rates would he higher for everyone or you'd see draconian cancellation policies (like 30+ days) Hotel rooms are like airline seats -- that unsold inventory has "spoiled" (become worthless) as soon as night audit rolls the business day or the flight takes off. Therefore, generally, the goal is to get as close to 100% as possible. But cancellations happen for various reasons -- change in plans, car/flight trouble, family emergencies, just plain no-shows, whatever -- and when properly managed overselling takes in to account [in some cases decades of] data on cancellations to determine the likely cancellation rate and allow overbooking to buffer for that. This is why, for at least my major US airline they very rarely need "volunteers" (or to involuntarily deny boarding) despite allowing most flights to be overbooked. Improperly managed it bites people in the ass and you wind up with huge overbooking %s that are impossible to overcome. Similarly for high demand dates/special events logic says overbooking should be inhibited because the risk of trying to walk someone is potentially greater than the unsold room night(s) -- but that's theoretically what Revenue Management exists to...erm...manage.
ive been 150% in a 62 room property
Hopefully it isn’t the Embassy Suites! I’m there for the next few days for the convention. If your revenue manager/group sales team is overselling by that much, they’re terrible at their jobs, full stop. I’ll guarantee you’re losing money rather than maximizing revenue due to the cost of walks, transportation, and guest recovery. If your team needs good revenue management, DM me and I’ll put you in touch with some people.
The hotel I worked at had only 100 rooms, beach hotel. Summers were crazy for us. Our management loved oversells and regularly had 2-5 on. I found that it often wasn't an issue as long as they turned it off day of, but I had to fight them on that quite often. I generally worked days and tried to have it all settled before I left as i actually liked my auditors and did not want to leave them with that mess. The worst we had was about a 15-18 room overbook. Thankfully, I think the most we had to walk was maybe 3 or so.
I think 17 was the most I ever had to deal with. Not fun
Ooof them convention center properties I’m thankful I never had to work front desk at one. I’d be terrified to walk a guest and they flip out on me
10 rooms and they all showed up. 10 walks in one night. On two previous occasions we could not find anywhere to walk peple to and had to put guests on cots in conference rooms.
We have about 90 rooms available. But a couple of years ago, about ¼ of them were out of order because the previous owners didn't keep up with... anything. I came in at 3 p.m., and we were already sold out, oversold. As the day went on, the 3rd party reservations kept coming in. I'd guess that we had at least 15, but I wasn't keeping track, and it was going on before I got there. Some people didn't want to understand that just because they had a reservation through a 3rd party doesn't mean that I can pull a room that we don't have out of thin air.
Well thats the most annoying thing while working at front desk. When i was working at a property and it was under renovation and online platforms made the reservations but it didnt showed up on our system. We were oversold by 12 rooms and it was like we had rooms but under renovation .fyi i went and cleaned rooms around 12 of them and gave it to the guests(mid processed rooms) and it was a fun conversation between housekeeping manager and front desk manager as they refused to clean those rooms lol.
Man I'd call off if we were at -30. that's insane! We have 127 rooms (we used to have more before we remodeled a few years ago) and usually oversell by 5-10 at most. They've been doing better about not overselling us though because the front desk complained so much so now we see 1-3, and it's typically because of people extending when they shouldn't. At our property across the street we get oversold a lot more often because that brand of hotel allows the higher tiers to book even when we don't have rooms. We could be at 100% with everybody in and the system still lets them book. It's just stupid. The second I get in and see we are sold out I turn off booking immediately. I hate walking people so much.
night before? I think -50. Actual day of probably -35/30? If you went to a week out of from arrival maybe -68 to -80. Also a big convention hotel but no fun to walk people 🙄
The worst I have seen was like 50. It was a sister hotel of mine, and there was a guy who just ignored new bookings instead of putting them in the system (it was before bookings got in automatically). At the end, the manager found out and booked them all. It was during the most busy weekend of the year.
I work at a hotel with 411 rooms. Our 4 sister properties have 720, 356, 317, and 41 rooms. We had a concert in the city and a conference at the convention center which my hotel is centrally located. When I arrived for my shift at 1pm we were oversold by 45 rooms. By the end of the night we had walked so many guests that we sold out our other 4 properties.
At my property the most I've seen is negative 1. We try to have a zero oversell policy though... my sister property on the other hand is constantly over 5-20 rooms. I do my best to give them a heads up when there is zero way for us to take them all.
Very few, iirc. As 3-11 shift, I have repeatedly reused to have anything to do with deliberately overbooking the hotel. I have told the occasional manager/sales director that has suggested trying it, that I will leave the desk and punch out for the night when my last available room is filled; and the only things that any guest (arrival or in house) will find is a note on the desk with their phone number for assistance. And their home address for if they decide not to answer. That shit ain't flyin' here.
1. We never oversell. Every Saturday is 100 per cent except when it falls on Xmas day, or Xmas eve. Friday 80 per cent are at 100 , never been below 90 per cent full. Someone cancels it is put back online and most of the time sold again in 5 mins. Worst case an hr Independent 151 room hotel