When switching to Clock as your Booking.com connectivity partner, existing reservations created manually or via your previous provider require special attention. If a guest modifies or cancels one of these bookings via Booking.com, the update may not behave as expected in Clock.
This article explains what happens, the risks involved, and how to best manage these situations.
What Happens When a Guest Modifies a Booking Not Created via Clock's Booking.com Connection?
If a booking was:
- Created manually in Clock
- Imported via another connectivity partner (e.g., before switching to Clock)
Clock will not recognize it as linked to Booking.com when a guest modifies the reservation.
In this case:
- Clock PMS+ will treat the modification as a new reservation and create a new booking. In case of cancellation, the new booking will be immediately cancelled if there is enough available information in the XML communication. If there isn't, the cancellation will stay in your inbox without actually importing.
- The original booking will remain in your system unchanged.
- If availability is limited, you may see an overbooking warning - this is not a real overbooking, but a result of both bookings being active simultaneously.
Note: This situation with duplicated bookings due to guest modifications will only occur temporarily - during the period when your system still contains Booking.com reservations not originally created through the direct Clock connection. Once all such legacy bookings have either been completed, canceled, or replaced (e.g., via a full push from Booking.com), all future modifications and cancellations will be matched and processed automatically.
Best Practice: What You Should Do
To avoid inventory and reporting issues, follow these steps when this happens:
- Cancel the original booking (manually created or from another provider).
- Review the newly imported booking to confirm all details (guest name, room type, dates, pricing).
- Transfer any relevant information, such as internal notes, To-Dos, folio items, or payments.
Important: You need to monitor for these cases. There is no automatic cancellation or merge of the original booking. If you don’t take action, the original booking may stay active, holding availability and affecting occupancy reports.
We strongly recommend regularly reviewing and tracking these modifications, especially during the initial weeks after switching to Clock’s Booking.com connection.
Coming soon
We are currently working on a feature which will allow to download the bookings from your Booking.com account. More details will be added once the option is released.