A double booking is one of the worst phone calls you can make. You have taken someone's money for a day that matters to them, and now you have to tell them you cannot come, or tell someone else instead. Most double bookings are not caused by carelessness. They come from information kept in more than one place, and from forgetting that a booking uses more than a date.
The three things you can double book
Dates
The obvious one. Two customers are promised the same day when you can only do one. It usually happens when two people take bookings, or when a provisional booking was never written down.
People
You may have two booths but only one person free to run them on Saturday. Or the attendant you scheduled booked a vacation months ago and mentioned it in passing. A booking needs the people as well as the date.
Equipment
If you own two booths, a 360 platform and one set of light-up letters, you can take three bookings on a Saturday only if no two of them need the letters at the same time. Equipment clashes are the hardest to spot by eye, because a calendar shows bookings, not what each one is using.
Use one calendar, and only one
Almost every double booking story has a second calendar in it somewhere: a phone calendar, a wall planner, a spreadsheet, a notebook in the van. Pick one place that holds the truth and make everything else a copy of it, never a source.
- Every booking, provisional or confirmed, goes into the one calendar before you say yes.
- Nobody confirms a date from memory.
- If you want bookings on your phone, subscribe to the main calendar rather than copying them across by hand.
- Time off and vacations go into the same calendar as bookings.
Hold the equipment with the booking
Treat each piece of equipment as something that gets booked, just as the date does. When you confirm a job, record which booth, which backdrop and which extras it uses, and for which hours. Before you accept another booking for the same day, check what is already held.
This helps on the day too. Whoever loads the van knows exactly what goes with each job, and nothing is promised twice because it was "probably free".
For things you have several of, such as identical speakers or chairs, count them rather than naming each one. If a booking holds four of your ten, the next one on that day can have six at most.
Leave time between jobs
Two bookings can both fit on the calendar and still clash in real life. A wedding finishing at midnight and a corporate breakfast at 8am the next day, an hour's drive apart, look fine on paper. They are not fine if the booth needs collecting, charging and cleaning in between.
Set a buffer around every booking that covers travel, setup and pack-down, and treat that time as busy. Make it longer for distant venues and for equipment that takes a while to rig. If a booking sits too close to another, decide deliberately whether you can do both, rather than finding out on the night.
Give provisional holds an end date
Customers often ask you to hold a date while they decide. That is fair, but an open-ended hold blocks the date for everyone else. Give each hold a clear expiry, such as seven days, then either confirm it with a deposit or release it. Write the expiry on the booking so whoever checks the calendar can see it.
Taking the deposit at the moment of yes shortens holds a great deal. See taking deposits without losing customers.
When it happens anyway
Even with good habits it can still happen. If it does:
- Work out exactly what clashes: the date, a person or a piece of equipment. Sometimes hiring in equipment or bringing in a trusted freelancer solves it outright.
- Decide quickly. The sooner the customer hears, the more options they have.
- Phone rather than email. Apologize plainly and explain what you can do.
- Offer a real solution: a trusted operator to cover the job, an upgrade if you can still deliver, or a full refund of everything they have paid.
- Find the cause and fix it, so it cannot happen the same way twice.
Your booking agreement should say what you will do if you cannot deliver. Read it now and make sure it says what you would want it to say on the worst day.
Doing this in Occanovo
Occanovo checks capacity, people, equipment and the time between jobs before a booking is saved, and the day view has a column for each member of the team. Each booth or piece of equipment is held for the bookings that need it, and you can subscribe to your bookings from Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar. See calendar and scheduling and equipment and logistics.