Booking is renumbered

[Adrian Ince]

On two occasions we have observed that a confirmed booking has been renumbered without any user intervention.
Scenario:
1. Booking #1234 request received
2. Admin confirms booking and email is issued etc.
3. Booking #1234 disappears…
4. …but is replaced with new booking request #1236 which requires approval

As a consequence we have a customer with their booking confirmation email for #1234 but future transactions, including payments, will be for #1236.

Our working assumption is that the admin has stayed in the booking edit screen and that WordPress has draft saved a new row to the posts table and related booking details to the postmeta table.

Can you confirm if this is what is happening, and if so propose a solution?

[Adrian Ince]

Note: we probably mean “auto save” rather than “draft save” – we are aware of the difference in functionality.

[J. Davis]

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for your question. Unfortunately, we were not able to replicate the issue. When you edit booking the ID of booking can not be change. It should be completely new post when there is assigned a new ID. You may try to content the guest and ask him/her if he/she did anything unusual after the first submission of the reservation request – whether he tried to return to edit some booking information and submit it again?

best regards,
J. Davis

[Adrian Ince]

Our guest doesn’t remember doing anything “wrong” when making the booking, but then they haven’t used the front end booking form before, so how would they know what the UI flow is supposed to be?
If anything this is worse than the scenario we described in the admin back end: if the the guest can renumber an *approved* booking from the front end just by clicking back / forward, resuming a session or resubmitting a request then you have a real problem in the code handling the requests, don’t you?
Are you aware of *any* scenarios from the front end booking process that can cause a confirmed booking to be renumbered?
Thank you in advance, Adrian.

[J. Davis]

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for your reply. This case might happen to the same customer so another customer could not book the same dates and overbooking was impossible. Though we have already fixed this issue since Hotel Booking 4.2.2. Please make sure you use the latest version of the plugin.

best regards,
J. Davis

[Adrian Ince]

This problem occured since 4.2.2
We are currently using 4.2.5

[J. Davis]

Hi Adrian,

The issue has been fixed and should not occur since 4.2.2 version. Most likely it is another case. Do you still get the bookings re-numbered or it happened once? Can you replicate the issue with 4.2.5 version?

best regards,
J. Davis

[Adrian Ince]

See above. In summary:
– It has only happened twice
– We can not reproduce the issue
– We can demonstrate that it DID happen, because we have emails with the booking numbers in the subject line for what is the *same* booking
– The last time it happened it was version 4.2.5

We need to understand how this happens, whether it is under our control in the backend or caused by user booking process in the front end. We are worried that this is part of a bigger problem with front end UI and that we may be losing bookings completely.

[J. Davis]

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for your reply. You may submit a request to our support team providing screenshots and we’ll investigate the case further.

best regards,
J. Davis

[Van Hove]

We are experiencing the same issue. It happens about once a month, we cannot reproduce the issue. MotoPress support already checked our website a few months ago and couldn’t find the cause of the problem.

I opened a new ticket today, but would like to know if anyone else is having the same problem. It is very annoying for customers who get two confirmations for the same booking with a different number.

With combined efforts, we may find the cause.

[Adrian Ince]

Good luck with that.
We submitted redacted screenshots of the issue to support but heard nothing back. We haven’t seen this happen again, but then most of our bookings are now through other channels.
As noted above, “Our working assumption is that the admin has stayed in the booking edit screen and that WordPress has draft saved a new row to the posts table and related booking details to the postmeta table.”
Wordpress backs up standard posts every 60 seconds, Motopress haven’t said if their software enables or disables these backups, but we can’t think of any other mechanism that would explain a row being written with duplicate post data but a new post (booking) number.

[Robert]

I have this issue too. It is only with bookings taken from external sites, not with bookings from my site. It happens more with AirBnB than my other partner, and used to happen a lot when I had AirBnB limited to only take bookings for the year ahead (once I removed this restriction it happened a lot less).

It is frustrating as I add email addresses to the bookings from the other partner so that they get notifications, but when the booking gets re-numbered all data that I have inputted disappears. I do not believe this is caused by the admin staying in the booking screen as for AirBnB bookings I would never go into the booking as I had no need to and it would still get renumbered. It must be something to do with the data on the external sources side or how it is imported.

Does this help close in on a reason for it happening? Be great to get this fixed so that bookings always stayed the same number.

[Van Hove]

Thanks for your replies! We are not using external channels and it also happened without us working in the admin screen, so there must be other causes. No answer from MotoPress yet, I will keep you updated if there is any news.

[J. Davis]

Hi Van Hove,

Thanks for contacting us. We have sent a reply to you and we will do our best to sort this out. Thank you for understanding.

best regards,
John Davis

[eric Brabants]

I have this issue too.
Sometimes some of my booking.com reservation are renumbered.

5 reservations out of the 8 I have at the moment have been renumbered on February 16 at 12:56.

I have no logical explanation.

But as it does not affect my work … I do not care.

In my case, it only seems to affect Booking.com, not AirBnB or VRBO.
Direct bookings via our site are never impacted

[Author]

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