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I had a crazy thought about switching to a 6-night minimum during high season and requiring check in on a particular day of the week. While that might be too specific, I was wondering whether anyone else is using unique availability settings to avoid or minimize gaps, or for other purposes. We are in our high season and have a 3 night minimum. However, if we find ourselves with a gap (we allow IB), for those dates, we may add an exception for a 2-night stay, or significantly raise the rate and allow 1 night.
But if you allow a 2 day minimum, then that’s going to apply to all bookings, won’t it? I wanted to switch to one day bookings from my usual 2 day minimum, but I realized I’d be opening up all future bookings for one dayers. I’m on IB also.
You can set different requirements for length of stay and checkin on a particular day, for any time period you want.
I have a 1-night minimum as a general rule, but 2-nights minimum if the stay includes a Friday or Saturday night, a 3-nights minimum during my peak periods(April to August and Oct 15th-Nov 6th and December.), then I add 2-nights minimum when I have only a 1-night gap I don’t want to fill with a 1-night booking (a turnover two days in a row is too much work for me) but I want to keep the calendar open should the booked guests want to add 1 night after or before his/her stay.
In the end a 1-night stay at Barthélemy’s is usually possible on weekdays from Jan to March exclusively.
If you select a custom date range, you can control when the 2-day minimum applies. Go to the Calendar->Manage Settings->Availability->[edit] Trip Length->Add a requirement for seasons or weekends. Then from the dropdown menu select “Specific Dates.”
Yes, high season (23 Dec - 6 Jan) I have a 7 night minimum arriving on Saturday.
Same goes for Feb 2018 and July - Aug 2018.
It is months away, and I do not want 2 or 3 night bookings that far out.
Currently I still have July and Aug 2017 on a 5 night minimum. They are almost fully booked with 5 - 10 night stays.
End of the week I will change the 5 night minimum to a 2 night minimum and increase the price for the hand full of 2 - 3 night gap.
I raise the number of minimum nights during the summer. Thought that it was worth a try, and gosh it worked! When all the dour day blocks had filled in, I reduced to three nights. At this point, I have a few single nights which I will use as recovery days. No reason to burn out completely.
This is how I do it: I’ve defined a season for my high season (Jan through April). Then I require Saturday check-in and check-out during that period of time.
I set the check-in day to Saturday, the minimum stay to 7 nights, and the maximum stay to 7 nights. This way, they can only book a 7 night stay and not an eight-night stay and ruin a weekend and probably a week.
It worked so well, I had 100% occupancy from the beginning of January until the middle of May this year. (Before you all gasp in horror at 100% occupancy “When will they do the cleaning??!”, we rent out our vacation/retirement home and have full-time staff that take care of our property and come in and clean and maintain during the week, usually while guests are out and about climbing mountains, snorkeling, etc.)
I do get most of my business through VRBO, not AirBnB, but I did get a couple of bookings through AirBnB this past season. But I believe that is because I have a fairly large and expensive property in a location where a lot of people come for longer vacations, and the AirBnB clientele is looking for smaller and less expensive accommodations.
I am loving the two day minimum booking now we are up and running! So much work to turn it over for one night only. I’ve also set a prep time before and after each booking thanks to another post on here. Phew ! That is all.