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When I opened my 2019 calendar I set a few rules for holiday weekends. For Memorial Day weekend, this was a 15% price increase and minimum 3-day stay with Friday check-in. The rule set applied to Fri, Sat, and Sunday nights. The intent was to prevent a reservation that split the weekend.
Well, that’s just what happened! The other night I got a reservation for Thursday and Friday nights, leaving me with Saturday and Sunday of the holiday weekend open.
Here’s what it looked like in my calendar. You can see the rule set that is still applied to Saturday.
I called Airbnb and the agent spent some time conferring with her supervisor. They couldn’t find a reason why the guest was able to book in violation of the Friday rule. “Just a fluke” that she was able to book that way.
That’s not giving me much assurance it won’t happen again! So I wanted to see if you all set your holidays up differently?
I messaged the guest to ask whether she’d prefer to extend through the weekend, or have me cancel. She ended up cancelling.
We get this problem all the time on Vrbo. On that platform, the minimum stay is set by the day they check in. So the solution is to block the Thursday night so no one can do what your guest did. Then unblock it after the weekend books.
I never use Air’s ‘automated anything’. I manually increase prices/stays for holidays/ weekends. It’s not like it takes an hour to set things for the entire year… Plus there are local holidays/events that an automated system just won’t catch.
They were able to book 2 nights because the check-in is on Thursday, which is a day with no 3 night rule set. I hate when this happens. Air messed up my holiday pricing one time too… but I was able to successfully cancel the reservation without dinging my account.
To be clear, this wasn’t automated pricing. I manually set all of my rates for the season and applied rules to holiday weekends for a 3-night minimum. Rule sets are the only way (I’m aware of) to set a longer stay for certain dates.
Yeah I think it only looks at what rules are applied to the check-in date. Homeaway does differently… In the future, you’d have to give Thursday a rule of 4 night minimum.
HomeAway/Vrbo lets you customize every day with whether you can check in or check out. So you could allow check in and check out on the Friday’ of a three-day weekend, but prohibit both checking in and out on Saturday and Sunday. Then if the start their booking on Thursday, they either have to leave Friday or stay until Monday
I ended up creating a rule-set that I applied to Mon-Thur of the week before the holiday. The rule does not allow check-out on Saturday or Sunday. (This seemed easier than setting minimum stay for each day)
So if it works correctly, someone could book a weekday so long as their stay ends on or before Friday or goes through Monday (Memorial Day).
Again, thanks for the suggestions, everyone!
@PitonView The new rule sets DO have a max stay function. I don’t think that feature was in place a year or so ago.
I discovered that the rule applied to the FIRST day of the reservation regarding length applies to the ENTIRE reservation. So, if you have thurs set at 2N, fri set at 4N, sat set at 4N, you could end up with a thurs/fri 2N stay. Once that Friday is booked, noone can book Saturday as a 2N or 3N because you only allow Sat start to be a 4N. You have to be careful & set the rule properly for the first night in your plan.
You can see this in action if you set up your rules & search for your own listing. I am pretty sure earlier on it worked how you “wanted” it to work. If I had it set to 4N on Friday, if you booked Friday it had to be within a 4N reservation. More recently it changed to be the length rule set on the first night.
