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.
Alternative: Request a Full Push of Bookings from Booking.com
To reduce the risk of these mismatches and streamline your process, you can request a full push of active bookings from your Booking.com account manager. This full push must be scheduled for date after the connection between Clock and Booking.com is active.
If approved:
- Booking.com will re-send all active bookings to Clock.
- These bookings will now be recognized by Clock, so all future modifications and cancellations will apply automatically to the correct reservation.
Important: After the push, you will still need to manually cancel the original bookings (those created manually or by the previous partner). However, from that point on, future changes from Booking.com will be matched correctly, and you won’t have to repeat the process.