Minimum stay (min-night requirement)
The fewest nights a guest may book — a lever that protects your turnover costs and destroys your occupancy in equal measure if left static.
Minimum stays exist for a real reason: every stay carries a fixed cost in cleaning, linens, and coordination, and a one-night booking spreads that cost across a single night's revenue. A sensible minimum protects margin.
The mistake is treating it as a single global setting. The right minimum on a July holiday weekend, when demand is deep and you can afford to be selective, is not the right minimum on a Tuesday in February eight days out.
Minimums also interact with the calendar in ways that are easy to miss. A three-night minimum applied across a month does not merely filter short stays — it silently creates orphan nights every time a booking lands mid-week.
The strongest pattern is layered: a higher minimum far out when you can be choosy, stepping down as arrival approaches and the cost of an empty night rises, with a gap rule underneath to catch orphans automatically.
Where it goes wrong
Raising the minimum stay to fix a soft month. A soft month is a demand or price problem; a higher minimum removes the bookings you could still have won and leaves the underlying problem untouched.
Related terms
- Orphan night — A gap between two bookings that is shorter than your minimum stay, so nobody can book it at any price.
- Occupancy rate — The share of your available nights that sold — accurate only if 'available' genuinely means bookable.
- Length-of-stay discount — A reduction applied for longer bookings — worth it only when the nights it buys would genuinely not have sold separately.