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History: I’m looking forward to next summer. I’m trying to make things a little easier. My current settings are 1 day between bookings & 3 night minimum. 85% of my peak season 6/1-8/31 rentals guests in 2021 booked 5 nights, most with Friday check-in.
60% of the rentals in my area are Saturday to Saturday. Saturday incoming traffic is terrible. Cleaners are stretched thinly if available at all for Saturday turnovers.
Now: Your feedback please: Would a Friday check-in with Friday cleaning, 5 night minimum be appealing? Easier traffic & guests have an entire weekend at the beach.
Is a Friday check-in off-putting because may need to take vacation day on Friday or a good thing because now have post vacation recovery time before returning to work?
Only you really know your market, but I think you might be able to draw people in if the first part of your listing description mentioned how insane traffic is on Sat. in your area, and how much easier it would be for guests to arrive on Friday. You might want to extend your check-in hours to later, since people might find it hard to pack up and get there after a work day until late, unless you have self check in and it doesn’t matter when they arrive.
We vacation in Orange Beach, AL, and Destin, FL, and only book condos that are NOT Saturday to Saturday for this very reason. The traffic is truly insane. Five nights is great. Four full days of sun and sand is pretty perfect. To me anyway.
I’m in more of a country/mountain destination but we don’t offer Saturday check-ins. It doesn’t work for our cleaning person or our personal schedule so would mean an extra empty night and many folks stay from Friday-Monday (or longer).
Most hotels here require weekend stays to include both Friday and Saturday night stays (which are priced at a premium compared to weekday stays). Never seemed to hurt our bookings.
Wow. It must suck to try to drive from one place to another in that part of the country. I’d love to be that niche Airbnb that offered one night stays for travelers.
Also this is good to know should I ever want to drive up that way again.
Based on your stats a Friday-only check-in and 5-night maximum would satisfy over 40% of 2021 reservations and that’s really good, but 2020 and 2021 data might be skewed by pandemic behaviors that may or may not exist in 2022. Do you have older data to compare?
Something else to look at is how far in advance the the reservations you want (5-day min with Friday check-in) were booked compared to the reservations you don’t want. This can give you hints as to whether you may have missed out on bookings you prefer. It can also give you a hint as to how much it might help to change your rules to increase occupancy, if needed.
I think you will get booked right up. Lots of people now dont want to take a full week, or they want to unwind before reporting in to the next work day. You might even be able to raise your rates because you will find a high demand for a friday arrival that does not require a full week stay. If you then find that a 5 night stay is too long…you can stagger and give a midweek discount. We fill a schedule like that. You also might want a thursday arrival - we get a lot of those.
There’s hotels that are more convenient to major highways that likely don’t have the same minimum stays as the more “destination”/weekender oriented lodging I’m thinking of. But yes, one night friendly Airbnb’s are practically non-existent here! Most are 2 or 3 night minimums and sometimes even more.
