Minimum Stay Through vs Arrival

Several of our hotel partners and even more of our apartment rental partners like to set up rates that require their guests to stay more than 1 night when booked. This can be because of the cost of turning over the room in regards to housekeeping and check-in/check-out procedures or anything else they like to manage from the Booking Factory side. For this, you would use either the Min Stay Through or the Min Stay Arrival restrictions in your Rate Plan set-up. 

Let´s start with a simple way to explain both options:

Min Stay Through: requires the guest to book a certain amount of nights in the first place if they are going to be staying on the night you are setting this restriction. Let´s say you are setting this to 3 nights on a Tuesday night only. That means this rate will not be visible to anyone trying to book for fewer nights. In the case of MinStayThrough, this would mean the guest would have to be looking to book any 3 night stay combination including this Tuesday night; Sun-Wed/Mon-Thu/Tue-Fri.  

Min Stay Arrival: requires the guest to book a certain amount of nights, starting from the night you are setting this restriction. Basically, this restriction says: "If you want to stay on this night, you need to book the two following nights as well". This restriction is simple to understand and does not complicate matters by giving you several combinations to work with. 

In most cases, our partners have this minimum stay requirement for all days of the week, always. From that point of view, it does not really matter which option you choose to use for your rate plans. It only makes a difference if you are looking at restricting weekends over weekdays etc.

Having said that, there is one strong reason to choose one option over the other. Not all OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) will accept both options from the Channel Manager. All of them do accept the MinStayArrival restriction and that is why we normally recommend using that one and "hiding" the MinStayThrough option from your Rate Plan set-up: https://app.thebookingfactory.com/client/#/settings/inventory/settings 

Doing this, ensures that you do not mix up the two options when updating your rates and restrictions at any point. If that happens after your intial set-up and connections to Channel Managers and OTAs, this can confuse everything and take some time to rectify.  Not to mention that you will start receiving bookings for the undesired amount of nights, defeating the purpose of the restriction to begin with. 

The image above shows you where you can find these restrictions in your Rate Plan when both are enabled. MST=MinStayThrough and MSA=MinStayArrival. Ideally, you would disable one from the settings as mentioned above and you would only have the other visible here, to avoid confusion.

Depending on which Channel Managers we are using to connect you to OTAs, there are issues with using the MinStayThrough option and that is why we usually recommend sticking to the MinStayArrival option for all our partners.

In case you are still not clear on the difference between these two restrictions or are having issues with your availability on OTAs showing fewer nights than you require, please get in touch so we can assist with the issue.