Shared Inventory - Frequently Asked Questions

Shared inventory is a powerful tool for maximizing revenue and occupancy. However, if Shared Inventory is not setup correctly, it can quickly cause overbookings.

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 your booking engine.

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.

You can split a house into two identical duplex units, but you cannot split a house into a king room and a studio.

Cloudbeds PMS does not 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 Cloudbeds PMS and/or OTA accounts, the possibility of an overbooking is very high.Without Shared Inventory, you need to be very careful and manually adjust the availability in your calendar.

Check the following article to learn more: Shared Inventory - Occupancy and Availability Calculation

When you have shared inventory it means that one physical room is sold in multiple ways.

Example: a single dorm room may be sold as a men’s dorm OR a women’s dorm, depending on which one is sold first. When one of these room types is sold one way, it can’t be sold the other way and the system creates a block in your calendar - as a result, a user will not be able to assign a reservation to the blocked accommodation.

If a property has very low availability, the user is unable to assign a guest to consecutive nights. In the event there are no consecutive open dates, the system will show a warning modal advising them on how to proceed with the assignment.