Platform change to minimum night rules - Anyone found a hack?

[Thomas2281]

Has anyone noticed that the minimum night rule has changed so that now you can only set a minimum nights in a calendar month? We had set our summer / school holiday bookings to 7-night minimum (had this for 2 years) and suddenly we have been getting part week bookings in this period. Total nightmare as our housekeeping team can only work weekends in school holidays. 
Called Airbnb Helpdesk who. confirmed that the platform update has changed the rules on minimum nights. There have apparently been loads of complaints but I have not seen these on this forum. 
We have registered our complaint too and will have to block out our listing for school holidays and use other platforms for those weeks where we can control the minimum nights.
If anyone has found a hack around this new platform rule, please do post a reply.

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Thomas2281 we use rulesets to vary the min stay and it seems to still be working. How are you doing it?

[Thomas2281]

Thanks for the reply @Mike-And-Jane0 Have you tested that it still works? We have always used rulesets and suddenly in th last couple of months we got bookings that break the rules (3 days in a 7 day minimum period) and so upon contacting Airbnb support today we got told that they changed the rules so that rulesets for minimum stays only work for calendar months. For instance we have the second half of July as 7 day minus and both weeks of Easter holidays, but have had bookings of 3 days in both these periods. airbnb say this is the new rule (although the FAQ page still describes the old rules) I have a feeling this is not a marketing shift by airbnb but a tech glitch that a developer has created in an update as an unintended consequence of another code tweak and they have not tested it properly in their qa process before releasing the update. 
In fairness the Helpdesk guy was super helpful and said it has caused a lot of problems, but the only suggestion he had was post here and register a complaint, but I also know how resourceful hosts are at finding workarounds 🙂

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Thomas2281 there has long a problem that a 3 day stay if started or finished outside the ruleset period could be booked. Are your bookings solidly within the ruleset nights?

[Frances3408]

@Thomas2281. Yes happened to me only 9 days ago and thought I had somehow made an error in season criteria!. Booking exit date (so not even staying that night) was also beginning of 3 night min so maybe @Mike-And-Jane0 is correct its an old bug still not fixed.

No hack, I just went in and manually changed it all back to 4 (so who made it 3??)- and not for the first time. I have only just opened up calendar to include the next holiday period and will check it all the time. Will also utilise other platforms as required.

Yes, where is this rule change notification? I expect its another bug. Maybe I will raise it too, especially as my acceptance rate on a new listing now looks s*h#t. 😉

[Thomas2281]

Thanks @Frances3408 and @Mike-And-Jane0 this is all very interesting. We were aware of the old issue of cutting across the period so this is interesting that the Airbnb support said there was an additional recent change which forced calendar months into the equation. 
We have accepted the 2 bookings as we don't want the canceled 'black mark' but we are going to extend the period of 7-nights in rule sets so and after these are full, we will open up the prior weeks, plus it has forced our hand a bit with setting up on a few other sites which is no bad thing, I guess.

Thanks for the replies!