Booking.com’s Ask for a Replacement Guest feature triggers when a guest cancels their booking. Instead of releasing the room immediately, Booking.com holds onto it and tries to find someone else to book it. If no one books the room within 24 hours, the original booking is canceled, and the room becomes available again.

Why can it cause overbookings in Sirvoy?

Here’s what happens behind the scenes:

• The guest cancels the booking.
• Booking.com marks the room as unavailable and searches for a replacement.
• Sirvoy sees the room as still booked (because it hasn’t received any update yet).
• If Booking.com finds a replacement, it sends Sirvoy both the cancellation and the new booking at the same time.

Since Sirvoy had no way of knowing the room became available in between, it looks like a new booking has been made on top of an already booked room, triggering an overbooking.

What you can do

There are two options:

1. Resolve the overbooking in Sirvoy

You can usually assign the replacement guest to the now-empty room from the original booking. Once you’ve done that, click the Resolve button in the new booking. Be sure to do this quickly to prevent the system from treating it as a real overbooking.

2. Turn off the feature in Booking.com

If you'd rather avoid dealing with the overbookings, contact Booking.com support to learn how to disable the replacement guest feature.

The downside is that Booking.com will stop looking for replacement guests, but the upside is that the room will be released immediately and made available to book everywhere, including other connected channels and your booking engine.