Hybrid - Gap and Minimum Night Management.

I have a situation that I can not decide how to improve......

I want to keep a 2 night minimum. I want to minimize gap/orphan nights.

Sometimes I will get an early booking of a Monday and Tues night. Then later, I find it difficult to get my full rate for the previous weekend because my gap night prevention is forcing the latter renter to also rent Sunday night that they really don't want.

I would like a hybrid feature to consider day of week, min. nights and gap nights...automatically over-ride orphan/gap prevention keeping Fri & Sat nights available even when Sunday or Thursday might become orphan nights because Wed. and/or Mon. are already booked. This would allow keeping those weekend rates up with orphan week nights being my chosen down side. It would be great to have this gap night prevention "over-ride" occur at X days from the dates, as set by me. Thanks.

I second this request - especially something like "disallow gap nights unless within X days of check-in date".  I just struggled with a VRBO guest who wanted to book a Fri/Sat but couldn't due to the gap night setting b/c my next guest was checking in on Monday.  I want the option to allow gap nights for last minute bookings (and the ability for me to define, at the property level, what constitutes "last minute" - could be a week for my smaller properties, or a month for my larger ones).

I was actually thinking about something similar earlier. I'd love some more flexibility with the Gap Night feature:

-Different gap night settings by season (not just the "minimum gap night" option in the seasons but the full Changeover Restrictions settings

-Different gap night settings by day of week

-Different gap night settings by days-in-advance (e.g. restrict 1-night gaps if 15+ days out but allow them within 15 days for last-minute bookings)

Related but worth mentioning here (or maybe in its own feature request), since it sort of relates to changeover rules:

I often need to schedule maintenance or other work (updated photos, fire inspections, etc.) on a specific day (e.g. Tuesday May 10th at 1:30pm).

I could block the night before, but as long as guests depart by checkout time, the night before is available. I could block the night after, but a check-in that evening works fine.

In fact, a checkout that morning and a new check-in that evening would work just fine and allow me to maximize revenue. I just need the daytime that day open, so I can't have a guest book for check-in Sunday and check-out Wednesday.

It would require a little bit of creative programming, but I think it could work using existing channel-supported criteria like check-in/check-out date restrictions, minimum/maximum-length restrictions (e.g. for check-in on Saturday, the maximum length would be 3 nights, thus forcing a checkout Tuesday in time for the worker to come, but allowing a Tuesday evening check-in for a new guest).

The biggest challenge is making the UI usable for non-technical people here. :P

Hmm good thought - at first, I was like, "there IS a feature like that" but then realized I was thinking about being able to mark dates (such as holidays) where people could NOT check-in/out to prevent turns.  I don't think there's currently a way to "force" a particular day to be a turn day, but there would be useful indeed!

A forced turn day is a good idea. I was trying to figure this out before, but just came across your idea. Probably a maximum length restriction becoming incrementally shorter as the turn day approaches is the way to get this implemented and working with the OTAs. I don't see it requiring it anything else. Though having OR set it up so it it automates the length restrictions for numerous days, would make it easier to implement.

I use Pricelabs to control this. They have this option to allow orphan gap control differences within a cutoff period. The only downside with Pricelabs is that the moment a booking or cancellation changes the calendar, the gap-prevention conditions (which are enforced by restricting check-ins/outs) is not consistent with the calendar until the daily syncing is performed. I wish Pricelabs or OR would find a way to do a Pricing sync as soon as the calendar gets changed, rather than at a set time.