Controlling your Minimum Night settings from PriceLabs

Note 1: Minimum Nights Restrictions are advanced features that control how long a booking you require on certain dates. These settings should be used with a knowledge of your market, and the kind of bookings you want to get. Please email [email protected] if you have any questions. Note 2: These features are currently not available for Kigo yet. Note 3: With Airbnb and Guesty, PriceLabs will overwrite the all minimum-nights settings you might already have in place for certain dates with what you have set on PriceLabs. We’re excited to announce the launch of a very important feature that many of you have asked for! With PriceLabs you can now setup rules for applying default Minimum-Night values, and apply special minimum night rules for last-minute bookings, for orphan-day bookings, and for far-out bookings. If this sounds interesting – read on! The minimum stay options can be accessed from the “Edit Customizations” link when you review prices for a listing. Once you enable the “Minimum Stay Update” option, a larger menu will open up. Here’s how you can use the 4 options available:

1. Minimum Stay Update: This setting needs to be turned ON for any of the other minimum-stay options to work. Once you turn this on, the dropdown has 3 options:
   • None: This implies that by default we won’t apply a minimum stay for all listings. Any of the next 3 options can still be used.
   • Fixed: You can choose a default min-stay to be set for weekdays and weekends. If the value in the first box is 2 (as an example), then we will apply a min-nights of 2 for all dates by default. If you also specify a value in the second box, then that will be used for the weekends.
   • Booking Value: If the value in the box is 300 (currency same as that of the listing), then we will calculate a minimum stay for each date such that a booking with value less than 300 is not possible. As an example, if the prices for 5 consecutive dates between two bookings is (100, 100, 150, 200, 200), then the minimum nights for those dates will be (3,3,3,2,2).
2. Minimum Stay for Last Minute Bookings: You can specify a minimum nights length and specify how many days out this should become active. In the image above, we have set the next 7 days to have a minimum 1 night rule – this can greatly increase the chances of getting last minute bookings which tend to be shorter in length.
3. Minimum Stay for Far Out Bookings: You can specify a minimum nights length and how far out this should be active for. In the example above, we have set a minumum stay of 4 nights more than 180 days out. This is useful to try and fill up your calendar with longer bookings far out, and allowing regular 2 day min in the main booking window (depends on your location!)
4. Minimum Stay for Orphan Bookings: You can specify that any of the above minimum nights rules be overridden if the default minimum nights rule is longer than an orphan gap in bookings – note that this means that to turn on this listing you should also have a default min-stay rule setup. You get a few different options in the drop-down (each of these is activated only if the min-stay setting needs to be reduced to accommodate a booking):
   • Length of Gap: For any gap of length specified in the box (in the example above, gaps between 1 and 4 days), we will setup the min-stay to be the same as the length of the gap.
   • (Length of Gap – 1): For any gap of length specified in the box (in the example above, gaps between 1 and 4 days), we will setup the min-stay to be the same as the (length of the gap – 1). This is useful because it might be pretty hard to fill a 4 night gap with an exactly 4 night booking, but somewhat easier to find a 3 night booking (though it will leave a 1 night gap open). Note that 1 night gaps will stay at 1 night minimum.
   • Choose a number: If the value in the box is 1 (as in the example), then we will apply a min-nights of 1 for all days in gaps between 1 and 4 days.

Once the rules have been setup, you can see the minimum night setting on the calendar at the top right of each date, and hovering over a date provides the reason the min-night was set to a certain value (screenshot below). You can also use the “Download CSV” link at the lower right corner to see all the settings at a glance in Excel. You can also apply these settings for certain groups of listings or your entire account by setting these up on the Customization page (Navigation Bar: Dynamic Pricing >> Customizations). Any rules you apply here will be used for all the listings in the account. If you want certain listings not to have the default rule, you can apply a special setting for those listings individually as described above. A full description of the hierarchy is available here. Like always, you can click on certain dates and override these custom settings except the orphan day min-stay setting. If you setup a custom 4 day min-stay for certain dates, and two bookings result in a 2 day gap, we will apply the orphan day setting to ensure that you are able to get a booking in that gap as well. We hope you find these new features useful! Each market is unique in how long the bookings are, and how far out they come – do keep this in mind when using these settings to your advantage. Do email at [email protected] if you have any questions, or if you’d like to discuss more!