Accommodations use software to avoid mistakes, to lower the load of management/work and to increase the sales. A channel manager software is mainly meant to avoid overbooking and so it is important to configure it correctly so that it will be able to do its job without any errors.
To ensure that no bad surprises will ever arise in the system, like overbooking, you should make sure to have the correct availability on your website with VikBooking. Do not waste time by looking at the availability on your portals to see if it matches because the channel manager will take care of it. However, it is fundamental to keep the availability calendars updated in your website with VikBooking to avoid any issues. As long as your website calendars show the true and correct availability, the channels will not have different information on the availability.
Sometimes hotels can migrate to VikBooking from a different booking engine or they can just put online their booking site for the first time. Before establishing the connection to the channels, it is fundamental to update the availability on your website so that you can use the channel manager to transmit your inventory to all the channels connected. For a fast update of the availability in VikBooking, you can use the page Calendar to manually input the future reservations. That is how you update your availability in VikBooking, by generating reservations that will lower the remaining availability on certain dates of the year and for certain room types.
Once the availability on your website is updated, and once the connection with the channels has been established, you can launch the Bulk Action - Copy Availability function in Vik Channel Manager that will transmit to all the channels the correct availability for a global alignment. At this point everything will be set up and you will not fear overbooking any longer.
Please notice that this function is only compatible with channels supporting Real-Time connections like Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda etc.. the channels using the iCal technology will automatically download the availability from your website after completing their configuration in the channel manager.
Also, before launching the "Bulk Action" to Copy the Availability, you must have mapped the rooms of each channel to the ones of your website (rooms mapping procedure) or the system will not know the relations between the rooms of your site and the ones listed on the various portals.
Please visit the related sections below of the Knowledge Base section for more details.