Shared inventory is the practice of selling the same physical room under multiple layouts.

Yes. Shared inventory is a very powerful tool for maximizing revenue and occupancy. However, if Shared Inventory is not setup correctly, it can quickly cause overbookings. Follow the steps in the guides linked to below.

Here are links to guides of four common use cases:

1. Listing the same private room as two different room types.

2. Selling the same room as both a dorm and a private room

3. Selling a whole house or the individual rooms within that property

4. Selling all units of an accommodation type on a calendar channel

While there's always a risk of overbookings if you're selling the same room multiple times, our shared inventory helps to greatly reduce that possibility by automatically adjusting the availability for linked rooms, especially for group bookings within the system and made through mybookings.

However, if two linked rooms are booked at the same time on an OTA, we're unable to adjust availability to prevent a guest from booking them both in the same reservation.

Yes, but only if is is split into units of the same accommodation type. For instance, you could split a house into two identical duplex units, but you cannot split a house into a king room and a studio. We're planning to expand this functionality in the future, however.

For more info about how to configure this, you can read through an article on the topic here.

Shared inventory is a paid add-on feature currently offered to certain property types. If you're interested in Shared Inventory, please contact our support team at support@cloudbeds.com to inquire about whether this feature is a good fit for you.

By default, myfrontdesk does not normally support this as the system will send the availability of each room separately.

If you create different accommodation types for the same physical room on your myfrontdesk and/or OTA accounts, the possibility of an overbooking is very high. Without Shared Inventory, you will need to be very careful and manually adjust the availability in your calendar.

Great question! Take a look a look at our Distribution Channel Mapping Guidelines!

The total number of rooms used for calculating occupancy, revpar and ADR can vary based on the linked rooms. Instead of adding all the rooms that exist, we use only one of them when calculating the reports. This means that the maximum quantity of rooms can be different for each day.

Example:

Room Type A has 7 rooms
Room Type B has 3 rooms

Room A(7) is linked to Rooms B(1), B(2), B(3)

Since we don’t really have 10 rooms at the property, we cannot use the 10 to calculate occupancy. If all of Room Type A rooms are booked, I cannot sell any rooms of Room Type B, therefore my maximum room quantity is 7. If 3 of the Room Type B rooms are booked, I cannot sell Room Type A(7). Therefore the maximum room quantity is 9.

If no reservations, blocks or courtesy holds exist: Max Occupancy =9 (6 room type A + 3 room type B). If neither is occupied, we always want to use the larger number.