Businesses that accept reservations must cope with the problem of no-shows: customers who make a reservation but fail to honor it. Hotels can protect themselves against revenue loss from no-shows by overbooking. This course teaches you how to strategically overbook and how to evaluate groups in order to determine which rates to charge.

You will examine the components of a successful overbooking strategy: no-show forecasting, no-show rates, arrival uncertainty, pricing policies, and cancellation forecasts. You will consider the risks of overbooking and review strategies to minimize costs and mitigate customer impact.

This course, authored by Cornell University Professor Sheryl E. Kimes, will help you create a group forecast and explore yieldable and non-yieldable business and incremental group costs and revenue opportunities. Finally, you will employ models to calculate displacement costs and contribution margins to determine which customer groups will return the most profit.