Inventory by channel
How many rooms you give an agency, and what happens to what it did not sell as the date gets close.
What it solves
Every channel sells against the same physical rooms, so they never get duplicated. But a hotel does not want Booking taking all fifty: it wants to give it twenty and keep the rest for its own website. And it wants what the agency did not sell to come back before the night is lost.
You notice it in things like these
- The agency takes the whole hotel in high season, at its commission.
- Rooms sit held for a wholesaler that will not sell them and nobody releases them.
- A channel gets capped in a table and the booking engine does not read it when selling.
How it works
One decision, not a cell a day
"I give Booking 20 rooms, from 1 December to 15 January". The split across types and the filling of the dates are worked out for you; no cell to touch.
Shared ceiling or dedicated allotment
A shared ceiling means "of my 50 I give 20 to the OTAs": a sale through your website leaves 19. A dedicated allotment is only spent by that channel's own sales, which is what a wholesaler needs. You pick per channel, with the sentence spelled out on screen so nobody confuses them.
The release gives back what went unsold
A few days before each night, whatever the channel did not sell returns to the hotel and that channel places no more. Nights inside the release are published to the agency as a stop-sell, and the sweep runs every few minutes, so the window moves on its own.
It says so where you ask
The front-desk quote, the widget quote and the confirmation spell it out: "Booking's allotment for 12 March has been released: what it did not sell came back to the hotel". An unexplained "not available" forces the front desk to invent a reason.
Where it lives in the panel
- Distribution & revenue
- Distribution
- Inventory by channel
The same rules live in the "Allotment use" tab of the channel editor and under the matrix: it is the same decision, written once.
What it needs first
The channel created and its room types mapped.
Channels
What it does not do yet
The limits, told by us
- The release only applies on nights with a cap. With no cap the channel sells freely and there is nothing to release.
Carry on here
Shall we walk through it with your hotel on screen?
Half an hour, your rooms and your rates, and whatever questions you have. No commitment and no card.