Room Availability

We're having major issues with the RDP "Availability" counts. On Friday, we noticed that the number of rooms available was slowly increasing all day, yet no one was cancelling rooms or checking guests out early. We were showing 19 rooms total available to sell. When it came time to assign rooms to arrivals, we realized that the availability screen in RDP did not match what we actually had left to sell. I called RDP and he knocked everyone off our system and ran a 995. When it was complete, our availability was reset and rather than having 19 rooms to sell, we found that we had 1 room to sell. Somehow, over the course of the day, 18 "ghost rooms" appeared in the availability.

The RDP tech I spoke with told me that this was likely a one-time "hiccup" that probably wouldn't happen again. He was wrong.

It happened Saturday and it's happening today. He instructed me to call them (i.e., RDP) back on Monday if the issue continued. I will not be in tomorrow, so I'm hoping someone else will call them and report what's happening.

Toward the end of my work day the last 3 days, I noted the following: Friday's count was off by 18 rooms (only 1 room to sell but RDP Availability showed 19), Saturday's count was off by 7 rooms (only 3 to sell and RDP Availability showed 10), and today's count is already off by 18 (we have 25 rooms available and RDP Availability shows 43 to sell).

Here's what we know so far: whenever we change a room type on an existing reservation, a "ghost" room appears; the room type of the new "ghost" room is the room type originally on the reservation before it was changed. So if Leonard Richman is reserved for 4/28 - 5/3 in an HDS1K, and we change his room type to an HPR1K, if we check the availability screen afterward in RDP it will show one more HDS1K (his original room type) than we actually have left to sell. The count will be off for every day he had reserved (4/28 - 5/3). So change 10 reservations today, and RDP Availability will show 10 more rooms than we actually have.

This is obviously a huge problem. I noticed today that the reservationists were kind enough to zero-out the inventory for the next few days by upgrading guests, etc. We had -11 HDR1Q rooms on Tuesday before they started, and now it's balanced. The problem is that for every reservation they changed, ghost rooms appeared (usually multiple days for each reservation) and now our availability is way off until the 995 runs again. We started the day with 0 rooms available for Tuesday, and after the reservations were changed to zero out the -11 HDR1Q's and other negative room types, it now shows 14 rooms available for Tuesday. If they sell all 14, we'll show -14 after the 995 runs again. So it doesn't just affect the current day; it affects every day for which any reservation was changed. Please note that we are -65 HDR1Q's for Tuesday 5/6, and -7 total rooms for that day. If I were to upgrade all 65 of those HDR1Q's right now to even things out, our total rooms available would show 58 left to sell despite the fact that we're actually 7 in the hole.

I decided to run a 995 while writing this message, so see the attached pictures for screenshots of BEFORE and AFTER the 995 ran (note that these shots are only 9 minutes apart and no changes were made to any reservations during this time). The "Booked Totals" available is the number I look at. The differences in rooms available are staggering.

If RDP doesn't fix this soon, we will certainly oversell at some point and it will be expensive for us (and it won't help our reputation). The only safe way to operate right now is to assign all arrivals for the day and then look at the tape chart to see which rooms are unassigned because those are what we actually have left to sell for the day. The only alternative is to run the 995 every hour or 2; a virtual impossibility with the number of people logged on to our system during the day (not to mention people connected remotely, like Maria and anyone who happens to be booking a reservation through senecahotel.com at the time).