Introducing Wheelhouse Dynamic Minimum Night Stays 🎉

We’re really excited to announce the launch of the #1 requested feature, as voted on by Wheelhouse customers, to boost your revenue and occupancy to new heights!

Minimum night stays was one of our original revenue management features to help our customers have more control over their yield. The original feature set only included options for global and specific date ranges. Over time, our customer base has needed a more robust set of minimum night stay rules to better optimize yield and, ultimately, total revenue.

This latest feature in Wheelhouse’s suite of personalized pricing strategies can help you get bookings for difficult-to-fill vacancies and protect periods of high-demand, especially for weekends and dates far into the future. That means you are more in control of your own pricing strategy. For example, you can now create custom rules to control the desired minimum length of stay for:

• Gap nights (e.g. automatically open a 1-day gap when there is normally a 2-night minimum stay)
• Last-minute bookings (e.g. 1-night min for last-min bookings within 7 days)
• Far-out bookings (e.g. 7-night min for stay dates more than 270 days away)
• Day of week (e.g. 2-night minimum during the week / 3-night min on the weekends)

To access Wheelhouse’s new Dynamic Minimum Night Stays and take your revenue management to the next level, sign into your Wheelhouse account and click “view strategy” for one of your listings.

On the lefthand side, you should see a strategy setting called ‘Dynamic Minimum Stays’. Here you will find the following:

Global minimum stay

Just as before, the global minimum stay will be the default requirement for any stay date not specified in other minimum stay rules.

For example, if you set a 3-night global minimum, guests would not be able to book for less than 3 nights unless you make additional setting changes.

Gap nights

One common issue that Wheelhouse customers encountered was not being able to fill in orphan nights for days in-between bookings that conflicted with the current minimum night stay rules in place.

The gap nights feature solves that by overriding the minimum stay requirements for isolated calendar periods shorter than current requirements, except all requirements set in the ‘Date-specific Minimum Stays’ section.

For example, enabling this feature would automatically open up a 2-night gap during a time period that normally had a 3-night minimum.

We’ve spoken to many Wheelhouse customers about minimum night stays, and know there are many hosts who do not want to have to deal with single night bookings though. We, therefore, offer our customers the option to explicitly opt into single night stays. By default, the box to opt-in will be unchecked.

Day of week minimum stays

Customize your minimum stay requirement based on the specific day of week.

If you are currently using the date-specific minimum night stay controls to set higher minimum stays on the weekends, you can delete the date-specific ones and instead use this feature.

For example, if you set a 2-night minimum on Fridays and Saturdays, any reservation touching a Friday or Saturday would require at least a 2-night stay.

Time-based minimum stays

The old way of handling minimum night stays presented an issue: customers struggled to protect stay dates far into the future and lower the minimum night stay for last-minute bookings given how manual of a process it was.

The new time-based minimum stays feature adds significant automation and customization. Wheelhouse users can now automatically adjust the minimum night requirements for stay dates within and beyond a specific number of days from today.

For example, you could set a 1-night minimum for any vacancies within 7 days to, along with last-minute price discounts, encourage more bookings and higher occupancy. You could also set a 10-night min for, say, any stay dates more than 300 days out from the current date to protect your calendar from less desirable bookings. Or, set a time-based minimum stay rule that works best for your listing.

Date-specific minimum stays

This is part of our original Wheelhouse minimum night stay settings! You can continue to create minimum stays for specific date ranges, such as holidays or events. Two important things to note:

• This will override all other minimum stay rules.
• Gap night functionality will not be applied during these specific date ranges.

For example, you can set a 7-night specific minimum for any reservation touching the time period prior to the Christmas holidays.

What is the hierarchy of all the new minimum stay rules?

To recap, date-specific minimum stays take the highest precedence, followed by time-based minimum stays, then day of week, and then the global minimum.

Gap nights, when enabled, will automatically lower the minimum night stay for all rules except date-specific rules. Date-specific minimum stays will always override all other settings and never be impacted by gap night functionality.

You can also view the minimum night stay settings for an entire calendar year at the top of the minimum stay section to see which rules are in effect for any given period of time.

What do you think of the new dynamic minimum stay settings? Drop us a line at hello@usewheelhouse.com or leave a comment below. We’d love to hear from you!

Want to save time and earn more? Sign up with Wheelhouse and start dynamically pricing your listings today. Use the promo code DMNS5 and get a $5 credit after a 30-day free trial!

Already a Wheelhouse customer? Log in to your account here and start using the most-requested Wheelhouse feature!