[jaclaz]

It depends a lot on the kind of hotel, the type of customers, the location, and a number of other things, incuding the distance to the other hotel(s).

If you are having tourists as customers, they may be not much inconvenienced by having to move to a nearby (really near) other hotel, if you are working with business customers they won't likely ever return.

In both cases, by my personal standards (not necessarily valid universally) when someone books a room in a hotel he/she is entering in a contract where one side guarantees the availability of the (specific, meaning in the specific hotel/building) room and the other promises to pay for that room (or the cancellation rate) and overbooking and moving the customer to another hotel, no matter whether it is 4, 5 ot 6 stars is:

1) a breach of that unwritten contract

2) a lack of respect towards the customer

And the "stats game" is the usual (poor) excuse to justify a less than correct behaviour, worse - if you are doing that extensively and to tourists (possibly foreigners that are not familiar with the city or the local language) - you are actually leveraging on their inferior position and their lack of power/alternatives.