Channel Allotments and the Common Pool: Decide How Many Rooms Each Channel Can Sell
Hoteliera How-To Guides & Tutorials
PMS, Channel Manager & Tech
You have 10 rooms. You want Booking.com and Airbnb to sell some of them, and your own website to sell the rest. You don’t want to block anything, and you never want two guests in the same room.
In Hoteliera this is done with two settings per channel: an allotment and the common pool.
The concept
Inventory is counted per room type, not per room. Hoteliera doesn’t tell a channel “sell room 12”. It tells it “you can sell 2 Doubles on 14 November”. You pick the exact room number later, when you assign the booking in the planner.
The common pool is every room that isn’t promised to anyone. By default, all your rooms sit in the pool, and every channel (your booking engine included) sells from it. A booking on any channel takes one room out of the pool, and every other channel sees the new number within moments.
An allotment is a number of rooms you reserve for one channel, per room type, per day. Those rooms leave the pool. Only that channel can sell them, and your booking engine sees the total minus the allotment.
“Sell channel allotment plus the common pool” is a switch on each channel:
- On: the channel sells its allotment first, then can keep selling from the pool once the allotment is gone.
- Off: the channel sells its allotment and nothing more. When it’s gone, the channel is sold out.
Two special values are worth remembering:
- Empty allotment: the channel has no reserved rooms and sells only from the pool. This is the default and the safest setup.
- Allotment 0: the channel is closed for that day, even if you have free rooms.
A quick example with 10 Doubles:
| Setup | Booking.com sees | Airbnb sees | Your website sees |
|---|---|---|---|
| No allotments, pool on everywhere | 10 | 10 | 10 |
| Booking.com 3, Airbnb 2, pool off | 3 | 2 | 5 |
| Booking.com 3, Airbnb 2, pool on | 3 + 5 | 2 + 5 | 5 |
In every row, a booking anywhere lowers the numbers everywhere else. You can’t overbook through the channels.
It works the same for channels connected through Channex. Hoteliera sends each channel its own number.
One thing allotments don’t do yet: two channels can’t share one allotment. Booking.com and Airbnb each get their own number.
How to set it up
1. Decide the split. For each room type, decide how many rooms each channel should hold. Whatever you don’t allot stays with your website and with any channel that sells from the pool.
2. Set the pool switch on the channel. Go to Settings → Channel manager / OTAs, open the channel (for example Booking.com), and set Sell channel allotment plus the common pool:
- Leave it on if the channel may sell more once its allotment runs out.
- Turn it off if the allotment is a hard limit.
Save, then repeat for each channel.
3. Enter the allotment. Open Availability & Rates and click the channel’s row to open Edit allotments in bulk. Pick the period and the room types, type the number of rooms for the channel, and save.
- A number reserves that many rooms for the channel.
- Leave it empty to remove the allotment and sell only from the pool.
- Type 0 to close the channel for those days.
4. Check the numbers. Back in Availability & Rates, each channel row now shows its allotment, what it sold, and what it still has available. Your website’s availability is the total minus every allotment and every booking.
5. Assign rooms as bookings come in. When a channel booking arrives, give it a room in the planner like any other booking. If you want certain rooms to go to channel guests, choose those rooms here.
Rooms with maintenance work are a different case. Mark them as out of order in the planner instead, so no channel and no staff member can sell them.
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