What reasons are there for a hotel to say that they don't have any rooms available, but a third party on behalf of the hotel does?

Not all property management systems work with online travel agencies, so what you'll frequently see is a certain number of rooms allocated to the OTA - that way, the hotel doesn't end up getting overbooked.



If it was a Choice-franchised hotel, Choice and Booking.com are well-known to not play and get along well together: Booking.com and Choice's proprietary front desk and reservations system don't interface or communicate one another: the hotel gets its Booking.com reservations via fax, and when you've sold the last room to a walk-in guest or in-house reservation, you'd better get on to Booking.com and tell them in a hurry, or else something very bad could happen.

In either event, what I'd do if I were cutting it close with available rooms is block as many as I had allocated to Booking.com (in which case, we wouldn't have any rooms available when you called us, but you could book one on Booking.com -- see Michael Forrest Jones' answer to In general, how can you get a reservation at a hotel if their website says they're fully booked? ). Or, if I was getting good rates on walk-in business that night, close us to arrivals on Booking.com and not take any more reservations from them.

Originally appeared on Quora