Holidays are a great time to make premium profits because demand for vacation rentals is higher than at most other times! That's why most owners charge premium holiday rates. But the rules surrounding holidays can be complicated, which is why OwnerRez supports three quite different overlapping approaches to them.
- Generic Holiday Settings
- Holiday Rates
- Spot Rates
- Common Issues & Questions
- Is there a way to configure the holidays to match the minimum nights of my specific season?
- Do holiday rates push to channels, if I'm using OwnerRez tools like Channel Bridge or an API connection?
- I want guests to be able to book a stay over Christmas, but not to be allowed to check-in or out on Christmas Day.
Generic Holiday Settings
The Settings area offers a master Holidays control page (Settings > Holidays). This is where you select the list of national Holidays appropriate to your properties. We offer lists for the United States, Canada, Mexico, and several European countries, with more added all the time. Note that, at this time, one list of holidays applies to all your properties.
You can also create custom holidays, such as if your properties are in a country we don't yet have a list for.
Don't overlook the settings at the top of the page, which control what days OwnerRez considers as holidays. Holidays can trigger different min nights or holiday surcharges. You can set holidays as just the day of, or add observance periods before and after, and include the entire weekend if the holiday is in or adjacent to a weekend.
The holidays and extra days assigned on this page, will be used to determine when your Holiday Minimum Stay length applies. This setting is found in the Rules section of each property.
Holiday Rates
Not all holidays have the same demand, so it doesn't usually make sense to have a single "holiday rate" that applies. The best way to maximize the potential of your holidays, is to create a Season for each holiday (or several in a row) with its own rate that overrides the default rate. This can be done using Seasons and Seasonal Rates, similar to how you'd configure the rate for any other season or time period.
Spot Rates
There's one more approach to setting holiday rates, that's maybe the simplest: Just set a specific rate for each night that should be charged a premium, and leave it at that! You can do this using Spot Rates.
Common Issues & Questions
Is there a way to configure the holidays to match the minimum nights of my specific season?
No. You can set an "observance period" for weekends when it comes to holidays but not a number of days.
This is because the holiday seasons are generic to all holidays whether they are on weekends or not, and even if they're longer periods like Christmas/New Years where you may want a much bigger 10 or 15 day holiday period.
If you want a larger holiday period with longer minimum nights and specific rules, you need to create a specific-date Season to cover the entire holiday period, and set the rules as desired for that Season. You can also use spot rates for the nights in that period, but Rules can only be set in Seasons.
Do holiday rates push to channels, if I'm using OwnerRez tools like Channel Bridge or an API connection?
Ordinarily yes, if the holiday-based surcharges are per night. If the amount is per stay, then it won't be included.
I want guests to be able to book a stay over Christmas, but not to be allowed to check-in or out on Christmas Day.
You can create a "don't allow arrival/departure on this day" using Seasons, separately from the Holiday settings discussed on this page.
Create a separate Christmas Week season for just the week surrounding Christmas this year, as a non-recurring season. Make sure that this Season does not cover more than a week - in particular, make sure it does not include more than one of the days of the week that Christmas Day falls on (e.g. if Christmas is on a Wednesday, do not include another Wednesday.) Also, make sure that no other Season covers or overlaps the same dates.
In the settings for this special Season, Scroll down to the Changeover Restrictions, check the box for "Override Property Rules" then uncheck the day(s) of the week you do not want a guest to arrive or depart. Using our example of Christmas falling on a Wednesday, you would uncheck the box for Wednesday under "Can Arrive" and under "Can Depart."
You may also want to associate a Seasonal Rate with this new Season—you probably want special holiday rates anyway. You can do this by navigating to Settings > Pricing > Rates, and using the Rate Calendar (also Tools > Rate Calendar) to Set Rules for those specific dates.
If you are connected to listing sites via API, these Arrival/Departure rules will be automatically pushed there. This will have the effect of not allowing a booking that arrives or departs on Christmas Day.