A booking confirmed by a connected channel that has not arrived in RMS can be entered by hand to prevent an overbooking, but the reservation you create is not linked to the channel.

A booking missing from RMS but confirmed to the guest leaves the Category on sale, so secure it quickly. Two checks come first: a missing reservation is not always a delivery failure, and one typed in by hand does not stop the channel's own booking arriving later.

Applies to: properties with a Channel Connection to an Online Travel Agent (OTA) or other channel.

Please Note! RMS is highly configurable. Some Terminology, User Access & Permissions, Images, Labels, and Functions used in these articles may differ from your setup. CLICK HERE to find out more.

Check that the booking is not already in RMS

Search on the guest surname and arrival date before you create anything, and include Quotes in the search. A channel booking that RMS cannot place is not rejected: it is delivered as a Quote, which is easy to miss if you are looking only at confirmed arrivals. Resolve that Quote rather than entering the booking again.

Once a booking reaches RMS it cannot be refused on availability grounds, and there is nowhere to put it except a Quote. So a Quote can arrive even at a property that never creates Quotes of its own: the Use Quote Status setting governs what your team can create by hand, not what a channel can deliver. Search Quotes whatever your property uses. RMS can still reject a booking earlier, at delivery, for a mapping or connection fault, which is the separate case covered in the next section.

Important! A booking with no Area is not the same as a Quote. Under Book by Category a channel booking routinely arrives Unconfirmed or Confirmed with no Area assigned, and the Area is chosen later. Only a Quote means RMS could not place the booking as a live reservation, either because no single Area was free for the whole stay or because the Category had no availability left for some of the nights. Those two need different action, so check the Quote's availability before assuming it is a fragmentation problem. See Troubleshooting: Reservations Arriving Unallocated from OTA Channels to tell them apart, and Why am I getting quote reservations from the Booking Engine? for the causes.

The booking can still arrive later

Whether the original can still arrive depends on the Failure Reason RMS recorded, not on how long ago it failed. Some reasons stop on the first attempt with no retry at all, including an unmapped room type; the rest are retried for a few minutes and then stop. Correcting the cause afterwards does not bring the booking through, so do not wait for it. RMS emails the Failure Reason to the property, and a mapping failure also raises an alert in the Message Centre, covered in Online Critical Alerts in the Message Centre. Troubleshooting: Reservations Not Arriving from a Channel lists the reasons and which of them retry.

Please Note! A booking is also no longer retried once its arrival date is more than three days in the past, whatever the Failure Reason.

Secure the reservation first and correct the cause afterwards. For the most common cause see Failure Reason: 'RoomTypeId or RoomTypeCode Not Supplied', and to stop it recurring see Fallback Category & Rate Type Mapping.

What a hand-keyed reservation is missing

RMS matches a booking it has already received on the channel's own booking reference, held in the read-only OTA Ref fields, and on the RMS Online Confirmation Number assigned at delivery. A reservation you type has neither, so RMS cannot match on them. Recording the channel's own references, as described below, gives RMS a second way to match.

• A modification or cancellation sent by the channel only reaches it if you record the channel's references below. Without them RMS has nothing to match on, and the reservation stays exactly as you typed it.
• Entering the booking by hand does not stop a duplicate. Where the channel sends the booking again, or RMS Support pushes the original through, a second reservation is created.
• Card details do not come with it. A booking the channel delivers arrives with the guest's card stored as a Credit Card Token or, where the channel did not send enough detail or the property has no payment gateway, in the RMS Vault. One you type arrives with nothing. Where the booking is prepaid or Collect, take the card or Virtual Credit Card details from the channel's extranet and store them on the reservation by hand. See Credit Card Information Received from Online Travel Agents (OTA's).

Important! Check for a duplicate in the days after entering a booking by hand. Where one appears, cancel the reservation you entered rather than the delivered one, so the channel's references stay on the surviving booking.

Enter the channel booking manually

Create the reservation as described in Add a New Reservation, using the dates, Category and rate the channel confirmed, then record the channel's own references.

1. Set the Travel Agent to the channel. Connected channels appear in the Travel Agent list alongside your ordinary Travel Agents, and setting it is also what attributes the booking to that channel for commission and reporting.
2. Type the channel's booking confirmation number into the Voucher No field.

Use Voucher No because it accepts typing; the OTA Ref fields beside it are filled by the channel and cannot be edited. RMS uses Voucher No together with the Travel Agent to match a later modification or cancellation to a reservation that has no delivery record, so entering both is what keeps the booking in step with the channel. It is a match-back key, not a duplicate guard. For the full field list, see Managing Bookings from Online Channels.

If the Category is full

Where a Book by Category Category has no availability left for those dates, RMS refuses the save and reports that maximum availability has been reached for that Category, suggesting you run a Reservation List to find the bookings behind it. Your property's own label appears in place of Category. On a Category that requires an Area to be chosen at the time of booking you get the Area clash message described at the end of this section instead. You are not offered a Quote at that point: the save stops. One of the routes below is needed. The first two let the booking in and hold the inventory, and a property may have to clear both; the third records the booking without holding anything.

1. Have Category Overbooking enabled on the Category beforehand. It is only available where the Category is set up as Book by Category, so this route is not open on a Category that requires an Area to be chosen. Take care with the limit: with the option ticked, a limit of 0 allows unlimited overbooking rather than none, as covered in Troubleshooting Overbookings.
2. Where the property is also set to Do Not Overbook Property, Category Overbooking is capped at the property's total physical capacity. Route 1 still works until the property as a whole is full, at which point the save is refused a second time with a separate message that the property has reached capacity. A user whose Security Profile includes Allow Property Overbooking can proceed past that message. See Allow Users to Overbook a Property.
3. Record the booking as a Quote. This needs the three settings in the note below. Set the Status to Quote and save: RMS allows a Quote past the availability block, so the booking is captured rather than lost. Use this to keep the booking visible while you free up capacity, not to secure it.

Important! A Quote does not deduct from availability, even where an Area is assigned to it. The nights it covers stay on sale across every connected channel until you change the Status to Unconfirmed or Confirmed. Creating a Quote by hand needs Use Quote Status enabled at Setup > Property Options > General Information > Reservation Options, Allow Selection of Unavailable Areas for Quotes in the same place to save it against an Area that is not free, and a Default Reservation Status of Unconfirmed or Quote at Setup > Property Options > General Information > Reservation Defaults. See New Quote Reservation.

Tip! Where you choose a specific Area rather than letting RMS allocate one, a clash gives a different message naming the Area and the reservation already holding it, which is the quickest way to find what is in the way.

Still Not Working?

Contact the RMS Support team with the property name, the channel name, the guest surname and arrival date, and the channel's booking confirmation number. Support can check whether the booking is still in the delivery queue and push it through, which is better than leaving you with a reservation the channel does not recognise.

Related Articles

• Troubleshooting: Reservations Not Arriving from a Channel
• Troubleshooting: Reservations Arriving Unallocated from OTA Channels
• Why am I getting quote reservations from the Booking Engine?
• Online Critical Alerts in the Message Centre
• Managing Bookings from Online Channels
• Channel Manager Troubleshooting Guide