Overbooking
Last updated: September 20, 2022
When the capacity or maximum number of available resources for an availability has been exceeded, it is considered overbooked. Although your online customers can never overbook an availability, it’s possible for logged-in Dashboard users to overbook, if necessary.
Click into the questions below to learn more about overbooking.
What factors determine whether I’m overbooking?
There are several different factors that can be used to determine an availability’s capacity and whether or not it’s overbooked:
Total capacity
An availability’s total capacity is the maximum number of people, tickets, or options that can be booked on one availability. How to find and update an availability’s total capacity.
Customer type capacity
Customer types can also have their own capacities, which you can manage in the Prices section of the availability. How to find and update customer type capacity.
Exceeding the capacity of a specific customer type will cause that customer type to be overbooked, but will not necessarily cause the total capacity to be overbooked. For example, the Child customer type below is overbooked by 1, but since the total capacity has not yet been reached, the availability itself is not marked overbooked.
Resources
If you have resources set up in your Dashboard, exceeding the maximum amount of resource uses for a given time will also result in overbooking.
It’s possible for resources to be used up before an availability’s total capacity has been reached. When no more resources are available for an availability, the availability will be considered full and will alert you that resources are being overused.
See our Resource FAQs page for more information about resources and bookability.
Blocks
Blocks allow you to reserve a certain number of seats on an availability to be booked by affiliates or third parties, if applicable. How to add or remove blocks. It’s possible to overbook an affiliate block, which may or may not cause the overall capacity to be overbooked.
How do I know if I’m overbooking?
Depending on your permission group, you may or may not have the ability to overbook availabilities. By default, all company users except for guides can overbook, and affiliate and partner groups cannot overbook. Learn more about permission groups.
When making a booking, you will be notified in the customer type dropdown when overbooking.
If you make a selection that will lead to overbooking, you will be shown warnings in several different parts of the book form.
The warning message(s) will vary depending on what is being overbooked. For example, “Overbooking availability” means the availability’s total capacity is being exceeded, whereas “Overbooking Single Kayaks” means that the customer type capacity for single kayaks is being exceeded.
You can still complete a booking with these warnings, but if you have limitations based on space or resources, we recommend making sure that you can accommodate everyone who has been booked.
What does an overbooked availability look like?
When an availability’s total capacity has been reached (or all available resources have been used), it will be marked Full in your Dashboard. Once the capacity or resource uses have been exceeded, it will be marked Overbooked.
The icon in the upper left corner of the availability indicates its online booking status. A telephone 
icon means that customers will be shown a “Call to book” message, while a lock 
means the availability closed and hidden from online customers.
Can online customers ever overbook an availability?
Customers making bookings through your website can never book more than what’s available, based on capacity, resources, and blocks.
Full or overbooked availabilities
Once an availability is full or overbooked (whether due to capacity, resources, or blocks), it will no longer be bookable to online customers.
However, you can determine what customers see in these cases. For example, maybe you want to display a “Sold out” message when an availability is full, or maybe you want the availability completely hidden from the calendar. These settings can be updated per item, in the item’s online booking settings.
Full or overbooked customer types
When the capacity of a specific customer type is full or overbooked, that customer type can no longer be selected by an online customer.
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Troubleshooting less common scenarios
Dashboard users overbooking
In some cases, when two bookings are made at the same time, it’s possible for a Dashboard user to overbook without seeing a warning in the book form.
This scenario is not very common, but can happen with larger companies where simultaneous bookings are more likely to occur.
Example: If a user is making a direct booking in the Dashboard and an online booking is made for the same availability before the user finishes the direct booking, they will not see a warning that they are overbooking. This is because capacities in the book form are not updated in real time when booking through the Dashboard. If the user has permission to overbook, they will be able to create the booking without knowing they’ve overbooked.
Workaround: One possible workaround is to update the user’s permission group so that they no longer have the “Overbook or underbook availabilities” permission. This will trigger an error when the Dashboard user tries to create a booking that will result in overbooking (essentially, the same error that an online customer would see).
Online bookings overusing resources
When two online bookings are made at the exact same time on different availabilities that require the same resource, it’s possible for the resource to become overused. (Note: If the two bookings are in the same cart, we properly prevent the bookings from being created.)
This scenario is quite rare, but can happen with larger companies where simultaneous bookings are more likely to occur.
Example: A resource called “Boat Capacity” has max uses of 12. Online Customer A submits a booking at 7:05:01 AM for the East Island Tour, using 10 of the Boat Capacity resource. At the exact same time, Online Customer B submits a booking for the West Island Tour, using 5 of the Boat Capacity resource. Both bookings are created with the same timestamp, and Boat Capacity is now overused.
Workaround: Currently there is no way to prevent this. A resource override can be created to increase the max uses, or one of the customers can be rebooked to another availability that will not overuse resources.