Workforce Travel Summer 2025: What To Do When Your Hotel Overbooked

There are few things worse than ending a long workday only to arrive at your hotel and discover you don’t have a room — especially when you have a confirmed reservation. 

While hotel industry projections suggest occupancy rates of over 65% for the rest of 2025, hotel revenue is expected to remain flat and operating costs are expected to rise. In other words, hotel overbooking isn’t going anywhere. With more and more summer travelers looking to wait until the last-minute to book in order to secure the best deals, it’s going to occasionally be a wild ride if you’re traveling for work and have complex lodging needs.

Why do hotels double book?

Hotels double book or overbook for the same reasons airlines do: To get as much money as possible out of every night (or flight). Sometimes a traveler’s plans change, which means a room that would have been filled stays empty. While that’s not a problem from a traveler’s perspective, from the hotel side, it presents a host of complex and avoidable problems. Here’s a more detailed look at why hotels overbook.

1. U.S. demand is softening

Many travel companies including airlines, hotel chains, and travel agencies have withdrawn or amended 2025 annual report expectations. Americans’ domestic travel plans aren’t as robust as in years past, and international travel to the United States has fallen considerably. International traveler spending is expected to be $12.5 billion less than last year.

2. Little visibility into revenue for the rest of the year

The U.S. political climate is adding to travelers’ uncertainty about their summer and end-of-year plans. With travelers inside and outside the U.S. experiencing that uncertainty, they’re all doing a lot less long-range trip planning, opting instead for a “wait-and-see” approach to U.S. travel. The result is that companies inside the travel industry have little visibility into what their earnings might be for the rest of the year. Filling every hotel room, then, becomes an even bigger priority. Overbooking helps hotels avoid revenue loss from potential cancellations and no-shows. 

3. Mistakes get made

Sometimes overbooking isn’t a revenue-boosting strategy. Instead, insufficient synchronization between a hotel’s property management system (PMS) and various booking channels can lead to unintentional double booking. Human error or miscommunication between hotel staff and online travel agencies (OTAs) can result in a room being sold too many times as well.

4. Traveler-centered industry policies 

It probably sounds ironic to say so, but traveler-centered hotel booking policies (e.g. day-of cancellations with no penalty) make the practice of overbooking necessary from the hotel’s point-of-view. With complex predictive analytics and business intelligence software systems crunching that reality in millions of different scenarios, it makes sense for hotels to assume some of their reservations won’t yield revenue; they’ll yield empty rooms instead.

What should I do if my hotel double books me?

For frequent work travelers, hotel overbooking happens. For work travelers within the Corpay Lodging (formerly CLC Lodging) network, however, a lot of help is available. Here are our recommendations for workforce travelers in our network, along with some tools to keep double booking from happening at all.

1. Use our 24/7 Traveler Support Center

Corpay’s Traveler Support Center is always open, and our team of experts can find you or your team a safe place to stay — while meeting any complex, work-related lodging needs you may have. We verify quality standards and ensure you get another option in the same locale or close by. 

Call our Priority Check-In Help Hotline for assistance in getting you checked-in or finding you another hotel with room availability. You can direct dial this priority number from your mobile app under Support.

2. Communicate early with your hotel

When a hotel has overbooked, common practice is to release rooms on a first-come, first-served basis. If you’re traveling for work and arriving late, this practice can put you at a disadvantage. When you make a reservation with Corpay Lodging, you can easily add a note letting hotel staff know that you’ll be a late arrival and not to give away your room. Simply flag your booking as a Late Arrival on your reservation form.

3. Simplify check in with our pre-arrival alerts

When you’re a Corpay Lodging member making use of a Corpay Lodging reservation, we send a pre-arrival email to your hotel before you get there. This email includes help materials to assist any hotel staff member who may be unfamiliar with Corpay, streamlining your check in process before you even arrive.

Are you responsible for booking workforce travel for yourself or your team? Find out more about Corpay Lodging membership and our workforce lodging solutions. We help take the work out of workforce travel for summer travel 2025 and beyond — plus signup is free!