Empty Nights Between Guests

I want to make sure we have a minimum of 48-72 hours between the departure of one guest and the arrival of the next. Not sure where to set this up for future bookings. Will I also have to change my Gap Nights settings? FYI - the purpose of this is to provide guests with a bit of extra assurance during the Covid-19 outbreak that they are not coming into a property right after someone else and that the passage of a few days will help to minimize exposure. Thanks!

There's no way to force gaps for the time being. We are working on adding that - it is often requested. If you allow shorter gap minimums, you could remove that for the time being, but that isn't really the same thing. The only other way is to create blocks yourself on either side of a booking after they come in by manually creating them on the calendar.

Airbnb is now advising waiting 24 hours after check-out to clean the property and a minimum of 72 hours between guests. My cleaning companies are asking for the same thing. Airbnb is actually requiring it for hosts who opt in to their COVID-19 First Responder promotion (https://www.airbnb.com/openhomes/covid19relief). (Supposedly Airbnb automatically blocks calendars for opted-in hosts -- https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Hosting/How-hosts-can-provide-housing-for-COVID-19-responders/m-p/1268186#M303155 -- but I suspect my OwnerRez integration is interfering with that.)

Given the seriousness of the COVID-19 crisis, can this be bumped up in priority? I know it's a long-term project, but TBH, stuff like this is way more important now than, say, a new rates editor.

Yes, we can manually add blocks after each booking, but that gets extremely tedious to monitor and change, especially with how quickly bookings come in and get canceled these days.

Yep, we've got a set of tasks that got bumped up in priority for COVID-19 related functionality and prep time between guests is one of the high priority tasks we're working on now.

Our new rates editor is a fundamental change that fixes a years-long problem, not just some new UI candy we threw together in a week. It's the result of many discussions over many months. We developed and scrapped several other versions before this. There will be several other updates coming on this in the next few months as we transition all users to the new rates model.

First Responder promotion is entirely voluntary and, as you pointed out, you can easily block time on either side of a booking in a few seconds.

We'll get to the Forced Gap rule soon - it's a good idea but not the most important thing on the roadmap. Hell, the covid scare has pushed a lot of users to turn off their Airbnb listings entirely. I wouldn't go anywhere near the First Responder promotion - the smart money is on that getting screwed up too.

I didn't mean to offend or to imply the new Rates Editor was an unwelcome addition. :) (It just seemed a bit of an oddly-timed announcement given other world events right now.)

But keep in mind I have one cleaning company begging me to allow a multi-day gap between guests and another cleaning company outright refusing to clean until 24 hours after check-out. And neither is really wrong. Tools to deal with that kind of thing are very welcome in the immediate term. Other features that have been in development for months/years can wait another few weeks without being missed.

The rates update actually **does** deal with current world events. The single biggest support issue in the past 10 days was not about forced gaps. It was about quickly changing seasonal rates to "covid" based seasons. As with all rate changes, the old split season/split rate screens with overlapping "all" options continues to make it difficult to quickly rates, or even to see them clearly. Again, it's not just an editor, it's a fundamental change in how seasonal defaults work (ie. there are no longer weekly/monthly type rates). If you could see our support ticket system, you'd understand very quickly how much of our time is spent explaining rates scenarios. 😜

I assume that you are creating blocks after your bookings to placate the cleaners? Seems like that would take care of it for now.

I shall defer to your support ticket queue. ;) And yes, I do understand now. Thanks for clarifying.

Although I use PriceLabs, so setting rates/seasons in OR manually just isn't even on my radar right now... :P

Yes, I have been manually doing blocks before and after each guest. I missed one the other day in May, though, and now I have a same-day turn for a property there. :/

yep. April is blocked bc our area asked for it. and reduced airbnb availability to 90 days so essentially only 2 months booking window. Even that is moot as there are 0 inquiries

Has any progress been made for this? I am inquiring if it was developed yet or it is still in the works. Perhaps I missed an update there. It would be very helpful. Some hosts manage multiple units, therefore, manually blocking can become troublesome and human error can happen (causing a same day turn around). Thank you.

Yes, we've had this ability for a few months now:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/property-availability-rules#changeover

oops, just saw the updated info