Does a 2 Night Minimum Stay Decrease Your Bookings

[Enoch1]

We are fairly new hosts, but we recently changed our availablity to a 2 night minimum. Since the change, we have only had a single inquiry.  Has anyone else made this change and noticed a significant drop in inquires and/or bookings?

Thanks..

[Gerry-And-Rashid0]

@Enoch1

Hi...a few observations...that may help

One night bookings - coupled with your offer (Instant Booking, events allowed, very light touch house rules, low cleaning fee, 100% refundable, suitable for big groups,) - sounds to me like you are inviting trouble and parties.

One night stays are more work all around - but only you can decide if it is worth the hassle and/or money.

Finally - I checked your calendar it is completely blocked for the next few months so it won't come up in general searches as you have zero availability. There is no point in guests seeing properties that have no availability. Jan 2018 is the first time you have availability showing.

Hope some of this is of use...

[Zack-and-Jennifer0]

I would have to agree with Gerry and Rashid's assessment of your property and calendar. Your place does look very inviting - Humble is a cute town and you have a spacious house with very flexible booking, low cleaning fee, and events/parties OK, so that would all certainly be attractive to guests.  I'm not certain what type of "events" you think people will want to have in your home, but I doubt you'll be pleasantly surprised when the first one goes down. Just my two cents, but you might want to change that rule, unless you are staying in that master bedroom and monitoring the situation.

Also, your calendar is completely blocked so that's probably why you haven't gotten any reservations lately; it doesn't seem like it has anything to do with your 2-night minimum.

We've always had a 2-night booking and we usually book 25 out of 30 nights/month, with the exception of March & April which are kind of a bust. We think it is odd since Spring Break and Fiesta (we're in San Antonio) fall in these months, but we are about 25 minutes from downtown.  Our home is a 3x2 and accommodates 6 guests. We don't live there, so our guests get the entire house. We don't allow events, parties, or more than 6 people. The first 4 guests stay for the regular rate and we charge an additional $20/guest per night for guest 5 and 6. We wanted to incentivize the smaller groups and hope that if only 4 people stay, then there's one less bed to wash linen and remake. I decided on 2-night minimum mainly because I don't care to be cleaning that house every single day.  Assuming that a group uses all 3 beds and is fairly tidy, it takes me 3.5 hours to flip the house (includes washing all linens and towels, bathrooms, floors, and wiping everything down) for the next group. Most of our guests stay 3-4 nights, but we've had guests stay 2 weeks and up to 28 nights as well.  To us, it is cost-prohibitive to have to flip the house every day and we'd rather have no bookings than a different group every night.

So, I think the first step is to fix your calendar and then tweak things as you go.  Good luck!

[Zoe34]

Hi, @Enoch1 - just my input, but about half of our bookings are one night stays.  However, we do NOT allow parties, and we actually live on the first floor, with the Airbnb above us, so I think that detracts people from a party as well.  But if I didn't allow a one-night stay, we wouldn't have a ton of the income/guests that we do.

[Branka-and-Silvia0]

@Enoch1

of course it decrease the number of bookings, specially one night bookings 🙂 Unfortunatelly it is a high demand for them . But, I would have 1 night bookings only if I would live in the same building or house, not on the other part of town. It is to time consuming (driving there, clean, waiting for guests, go home) and as I have to pay loandry service and gasoline it is not worth it. 

Now I accept it just to fill the gaps

[Kevin1332]

I take on single nights and i have a cleaning guy that cleans any day i need. I would rather single nights for the revenue, but bear in mind the larger the place (aka 2 bedroom unit) the more likely you'll have a party. It's not the end of the world unless you don't want to piss of the tenants (which is true for my case). I find single nights are good except from people from less affluent neighborhoods which you can tell because they tend to ask a lot of questions about payments. Sadly you can't screen for them if you have auto book on (which I do), and I have about 1 problem a month and about 5 nights where my neighbors probably aren't too happy. I'm considering switching to 2 nights to lessen the opportunity for parties despite losing revenue. I get about 30% of my nights off of single night bookings, not to say I couldn't get close to that number with 2 night bookings as well, i just need to try it out. 

If you want some idea of revenue I'd recommend looking at https://www.airdna.co/blog/whats-the-best-minimum-night-stay-policy-on-airbnb

[Sarah977]

Whether a 2 night minimum (I have a 3 night minimum) will decrease bookings is very much dependent on your area and why people come there. There isn't a yes or no answer. People don't come to my area for 1 night, they aren't just passing through, they don't come on business. It's a beach vacation destination and people come for usually at least a week. But if you are in a city, near an airport, somewhere people travel for business, or a convenient stop for the night on the way from point A to point B, the one night bookings may be the majority of your business.