"Min-stay Through" Support (Enforce min stay of all nights in reservation, not only check-in night)
We set variable min-night stays. Specifically, weekend nights have longer min nights than weeknights. This is because our market is typically weekend stays, so we prefer that guests that come for a weekend don't only stay for Friday and Saturday because that makes it so that the weeknights around that weekend don't get booked. Instead, we set it so that weekend stays have a min night stay of 3, 4, or even 5 nights, while weeknights are set at 2 or 3 nights minimum. This way, we can fill out the weeknights with the few travelers that want to just spend a few weeknights and enforce longer reservations for stays that include the weekend.
The issue is that Hostaway only supports enforcing the min night stay based on the check-in date's min-night stay setting. So, for example, if we set Friday and Saturday to have a 4-night minimum, and Monday-Thurs have 2 night min, somebody could book for check-in Thursday and only stay 2 nights. This is because the min-night stay is only enforces based on the check-in day and not on all of the days in the reservation, so the min-night requirement of Friday would be ignored in this case. This has the opposite of the desired effect. That reservation would block off Thursday and Friday night, and Saturday (our most expensive night) would stay open and likely not get booked because in our market, travelers usually look for the whole weekend.
The way around this is to enable "min night through" functionality. This means that not only would the check-in date's min-night requirement be respected, but the reservation would need to respect all of the min-night stays of all of the dates booked.
Not having this functionality is costing us tremendously. We are creating a bunch of gap nights that don't get booked because of this. Guests are being able to reserve much shorter reservations than what we want to allow and some of our most expensive nights that typically have the highest demand are being left vacant. This is lowering our occupancy and RevPAR tremendously.
Other PMS's do have this functionality. We use PriceLabs to set min-night stays in this variable way. They have the ability to set this the correct way, but they say Hostaway's API doesn't have the functionality built. They can successfully sync these settings to other PMSs.
For anybody that also want to see this functionality built, please "upvote" this request. The way Hostaway uses these requests is that they consider implementing the ones with the most upvotes (not comments or follows). The way to upvote is by clicking the tiny up arrow UNDER the follow button. If you do it successfully, you'll see the number between the upvote and downvote arrows increment.
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1000%! We had this desired functionality in another CMS. I'm missing it now and it is also costing us errant bookings especially on long holiday weekends where like you we intend to protect our min nights and maximize profits.
The current Hostaway programing logic is not conducive to the day-to-day realities of hotel operation with regards to MLOS in my experience. Hoteliers need to be empowered to set min nights and the software should not accept a booking unless it satisfies the MLOS for every single day of the reservation. Or at least give hosts the option to choose between which logic we want to follow: first night MLOS or complete stay MLOS.
My example below, I had set 12/26 to be a 3 night min thinking that a guest would need to book from 12/24-12/27 only to find that Hostaway allowed the guest to book ignoring the MLOS on the second night of the stay. We're seeing this all over our calendar. This should have 10,000 upvotes. They really need to fix this!
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