Hotel Distribution: What is the Difference Between Minimum Stay Through and Arrival Restrictions

Did you know there are two types of minimum stay restrictions and they operate in a similar but different way.

What is the Min Stay Restriction (Mlos)?

Rate plans usually have the min stay restriction for 2 reasons:

Revenue Management Reason — The hotel manager or revenue manager decides that this coming Saturday night is very busy but the shoulder nights are quiet so he puts a 2 night min stay for Saturday so it blocks more bookings for 1 night stays.

Rate Plan Offers — The other reason for min stay is to create offers like Stay 2 nights and get a 10% discount off the normal rate.

Minimum Stay Through — How it works

Stay Through works by looking at each night that the guest wants to book, it takes the highest number from all the dates and checks if this is higher than the booking length. Arrival type works by only looking at the first night restriction of the booking dates.

For our examples lets take a typical weekend scenario of a busy Saturday night.

• Friday Night is quiet
• Saturday is Busy
• Sunday is quiet

If hotelier decides to put a 3 night minimum stay through restriction on the Saturday night this is what is allowed to happen

Guest Can Book:

• Friday 1 night is fine as this has 1 night minimum stay
• Friday 3 nights is fine also as it matches the 3 night rule on the Saturday
• Friday for 2 nights is not possible (Min stay on Sat = 3)

Min Stay Arrival Restriction

The arrival restriction works by only looking at the arrival date only. It doesn’t matter if theres other nights with different amounts.

Lets take the same example as above:

Guest Can Book:

• Friday 1 night is fine as Friday has 1 night minimum stay
• Friday 2 night is fine as Friday has 1 night minimum stay
• Friday 3 night is fine as Friday has 1 night minimum stay

What was the difference?

You notice that with arrival restriction the Friday booking for 2 nights is now bookable. This might be what the hotelier wanted to happen or maybe he really wants only 3 nights to be booked with the Saturday night.

Can Stay Arrival Work like Stay Through?

It can come close!

If on our above example we add this restriction:

Friday night = 3 min stay arrival

Now if you book Friday you can only book 3 nights

But….

Now the 1 night Friday is not allowed!

Which is best to use?

Unfortunately it’s not such an easy choice, most channels only support Minimum Stay Arrival. This means you have to use it and lots of channel managers made a decision to only support Arrival Restriction and not Stay Through to make it simpler.

In Reality the best choice is to use Minimum Stay Arrivals it’s supported on every channel.

You can use Min Stay Through and accept that some channels will work like Min Stay Arrival.

Fun Fact

Did you know that if you use minimum stay of 2 the both restrictions work exactly the same way?

Opera PMS only supports Min Stay Arrival but they have a “Min Stay Not Allowed” restriction which makes it super flexible. But unfortunately no channel supports this.

Also if you use min stay rate plans like “Stay 3 nights get 10% off” these also work the same way as all days have the same number.

Booking.com can support both and Expedia you can tell your account manager to choose which you would like.