We have been using both Airbnb & VRBO for roughly 8 years now and either by coincidence or luck we have somehow not run into a situation like this until recently and after discussing this with Airbnb today it does not sound like there is a solution on Airbnb, like there is on VRBO, so I wanted to ask the community if they have experienced this and potentially have any advice?
Our bread and butter months are basically mid-June to mid-August and we try to achieve 100% occupancy in this window with 7-night minimums. VRBO allows us to create a custom window and impose both a 7-night minimum AND a specific check-in and check-out day of the week. We always choose Saturday to Saturday and it's worked out pretty well historically. We currently have our VRBO calendar set up as such and I suppose we assumed the same to be true on Airbnb, but after we received a booking this week on Airbnb for next July from a Sunday to Sunday, I was surprised to find out that Airbnb does not allow for the same custom check-in/out day of the week, like VRBO does.
In this particular situation, this now leaves us with a 1-night opening between the prior Saturday check-out and the new Sunday check-in that will likely go un-booked because 1-night rentals are not very popular in our town. Furthermore, this now creates a 6-night gap that doesn't jive with the 7-night minimum and Saturday to Saturday check-in/out that is being imposed on VRBO, so it's really a conflicting situation between the two synced calendars.
Again, we have always managed to maintain a Saturday to Saturday cadence in the past, so I'm not sure if Airbnb has recently removed the capability for hosts to restrict check-in/out days or not, but while this is currently an isolated/one booking issue for us, it could potentially compound if we were to get additional non-Saturday to Saturday bookings on Airbnb. Hope this all makes sense and we're all ears, so hopefully someone out there can understand/sympathize with/educate us! Thanks!
PS - We are aware of the ability on Airbnb, under availability settings, to restrict check-in/out days, but this would be for the entire year and not the specific window that we need, so it does not work for us.
