Hoteliers and Revenue Managers have a lot of good reasons to use stay restrictions. This includes attracting the right guests and creating the value proposition they want. In this guide you will learn how to use these restrictions in RoomPriceGenie.
*This feature is available in both Advanced and Professional plans, with additional advanced options to the Professional plan.
What Are Minimum Stay Restrictions?
Also abbreviated to MinStay or MinLOS (Minimum Length Of Stay), these rules restrict bookings for a property. For instance, when a Minimum Stay of 3 nights is set for a particular day, then any booking covering that day will need to be at least 3 consecutive nights long to be accepted in the PMS/CM.
Why use Min Stay?
Imagine you run a small B&B in a much-loved traditional seaside town. Your guests are usually families looking for an affordable but nice place to stay. However since last month, you started using OTAs to widen your reach and now you have loads of football fans and stag parties taking advantage of your affordable rates, staying just 1 night and making a lot of nois and driving away your target customers: families .
Your solution? Stay restrictions! The families almost always stay for at least 2 nights and you've noticed that the people who stay longer give better reviews and spend more on extras. So it's a win-win, you restrict guests to booking at least 2 nights, maximize profits and indirectly encourage the kind of guests you're looking to host
Hoteliers and Revenue Managers have a lot of good reasons to use stay restrictions. This includes attracting the right guests and creating the value proposition they want.
How Minimum Stay Restrictions works into RoomPriceGenie?
RoomPriceGeniee pulls minimum stay restrictions from the PMS and displays these in the calendar.
We have also built some handy visualizations to help you identify which other nights might be affected by that restriction.
As with prices, a full suite of adjustments are possible:
- Setting a new Min Stay for a room type in RoomPriceGenie (or applying the same to all room types)
- Bulk edit to add restrictions or set them to 1
- Bulk remove to go back to what was set in the PMS
- Min Stay restrictions set in RoomPriceGenie will be applied alongside price recommendations
Orphan gap correction
Sometimes minimum stays are impossible. When every room of one type if booked out on Thursday night and on Sunday night, then a restriction of 3 nights on Friday or Saturday doesn't make sense and if it's applied this room will be un-bookable.
With orphan gap correction RoomPriceGenie automatically searches for situations like this and changes the restriction to something that will work (in the example above a 3-night restriction would automatically be reduced to 2 nights)
- Orphan Gap Correction can be found in the new Min Stay Restrictions settings Page ( Pricing Strategy > Min Stay Restrictions )
- It can be turned on or off per room type
- You can also turn off Orphan Gap correction on specific dates and through bulk edits.
- This is limited to turning off all corrections/automation of min stay on these dates - we don't support cherry picking.
Automatically remove min stay restrictions
We noticed that some of our clients were regularly removing minimum stay restrictions either in response to a lower that expected occupancy or simply close to the arrival date as a way to boost demand and fill up leftover rooms. With Automatic Removal we've automated these actions, giving our clients back hours of time that would be wasted on a manual task.
- Automatic Removal can also be found on the Min Stay Restrictions settings page Pricing Strategy > Min Stay Restrictions )
- You can set different and multiple criteria for their room types to remove all stay restrictions either with a certain number of days to go to arrival, or when the occupancy of the property does not reach a threshold within a certain number of days to go to arrival
Adjust min stay with daily and bulk adjustments
As with Pricing, we give you the option to adjust Minimum Stay restrictions, you can simply set the Min Stay you want and upload this to your PMS in the same way as prices. There are, however, a couple of extra things to think about for Min Stay management:
- "Enter 1 to remove": in most cases, we treat a minimum stay of 1 as equivalent to no minimum stay restriction. If the PMS is Mews, for example, this will mean that we remove any restriction set by RoomPriceGenie if 1 is set. We make this easier to understand with a box below the input field prompting the user to "Enter 1 to remove"
- Entering "0" will reset the restriction to whatever is in the PMS
- This logic is also present in Bulk Edit
- "Corrected Min Stay": Here, we show the outcome of any automation, including Orphan Gap Correction. In the example below, you can see that the Min Stay will be corrected to "None"; in other words, it will be removed.
- "Ignore Correction": Here we give you the option to ignore the "Corrected Min Stay" shown in the column before. If this setting is on for a date, then this means that automation won't apply and we will use the value you set for that date instead. The option to "Ignore Correction" is also available in Bulk Edit
