Overselling
sale of a commodity or service in excess quantity
Overselling or overbooking is sale of a volatile good or service in excess of actual supply. Overselling is a common practice in the travel and hospitality sectors, in which it is expected that some people will cancel. The practice occurs as an intentional business strategy in which sellers expect that some buyers will not consume all of the resources they are entitled to, or that some buyers will cancel. The practice of overselling aims to ensure that 100% of available supply will be used, resulting in the maximum return on investment. If more customers than the seller expects do wish to purchase or use the sold commodity, it may leave some customers lacking a service they expected to receive.
Overbooking is regulated (though rarely prohibited) in many countries and industries, and companies that do practice it are often required or forced by market competition to offer large amounts of compensation to customers as an incentive for them to not take up their purchase.
An alternative to overbooking is discouraging consumers from buying services they do not actually intend to use. This can be done by making reservations non-refundable, a common practice among low-cost carriers and railways, or requiring customers wishing to cancel their right to a service to pay a termination fee.
Tourism industry
An airline, rail or shipping company may book more customers onto an aircraft, train or cruise ship than can actually be accommodated. This allows them to have a (nearly) full vehicle on most runs, even if some customers miss the trip (tickets are often rebookable afterward).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Overselling” as sale of a commodity or service in excess quantity. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q331454. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Overselling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.