About
Gap night settings allow clients to set up rules where their minimum night settings get automatically reduced X days out from today, to maximize their occupancy and revenue.
How to set up
- Ask your customer success associate or contact support@hostaway.com to enable the feature flag for your account
- Once the feature flag is enabled for your account, all you need to do is go into the listing booking settings and enable the gap nights feature:
- Smallest allowed gap: What is the absolute smallest reservation that a client is willing to accept to fill in gaps
- Allow gaps between: How many days into the future should the Gap Night rules apply?
How it works
Once this feature is enabled, Hostaway will automatically update the minimum nights on the day of arrival for dates that fall within the range of days you have selected, if there is an available gap that is less than the current minimum night length of stay settings for that listing.
Examples
All listings have the following settings:
- Length of stay minimum nights: 4
- Gap nights: Enabled
- Smallest allowed gap: 2
- Allow gaps between: 1 and 60 days out
- The current date for this examples is the 20th of January
Case 1
The minimum nights for the 31st of January and the 1st of February are set to 2.
This is because:
- The dates fall within the allowed gap date range
- The gap is less than the listing’s minimum number of nights (which was 4)
- It’s set to 2 because that’s what the smallest allowed gap is set to
Case 2
The minimum nights from the 6th of February till the 10th are set to 4.
This is because the gap is equal or more to the listing’s minimum nights (which was 4)
Case 3
Cross-listing
- The first child has the minimum number of nights reduced to four because:
- The dates fall within the allowed gap date range
- The gap is less than the listing’s minimum number of nights (which was 4)
- It’s set to 2 because that’s what the smallest allowed gap is set to
- The parent has the minimum nights reduced to 2 because:
- The dates fall within the permitted gap date range
- The gap is less than the listing’s minimum number of nights (which was 4)
- It’s set to 2 because that’s what the smallest allowed gap is set to
- The second child retains its original minimum night settings because:
- There is no gap in its calendar
Case 4
The minimum nights remain 4, because:
- The gap is only for one sub-unit
- There are still available sub-units
- The gap nights will only apply for multi-unit listings if all units have a gap
Case 5 (Cancelled reservation)
If a reservation gets canceled and you don’t have a “gap” in your calendar anymore, our system will default the minimum nights during the gap back to the minimum settings of your listing.
What happens to my manually overridden settings?
- You can manually change the minimum nights on the calendar like you always have.
- Our system will remember that you have manually overridden
- Additionally, if you make any manual changes to the calendar, we will automatically disable the gap night settings for those dates on that listing
If you don’t want to have to deal with the manual changes of minimum nights on your calendar, you can go ahead and re-enable the feature by selecting the dates where you have manually overridden the minimum night settings, and enabling the “gap night reservations enabled switch”.