Guests are Happy to Pay More For "Gap Nights"

welcome back to the show I'm glad you're here I'm just going to jump right in because I know last week we got a little uh doom and gloomy and we talked about the state of the economy if you miss it go back and check it out we did break down the most important metric that we use to monitor our properties uh and we gave some great examples on that so go back and check that out if you missed it this week we're going to talk about

how to earn a little B more revenue from what we call Gap night what is a gap Knight you may have heard this term uh referred to as an orphan KN that's kind of I don't know orphan Knight's kind of like a sad sad word right just mean like a bit of being stranded or something like that so let's just go with gap day uh or a day that's sandwiched between two days this is essentially a day in your calendar that you are not able to

book because of the way that you have your minimum night stay requirements set up so let's say you have a three night minimum stay and you have a three night reservation and then you have a 2-day window or Gap and then you have another three night stay well the two days in the middle that is the gap day that is the sandwich time that is UN bookable what can we do at this time well we can simply offer it to both reservations on both sides of

this Gap at a discount but before we talk about offering the discount on this Gap night let's just talk real real quickly about minimum nights in general your minimum nights should be based off your average length of stay and so if your Market has an average length of stay of two nights and your minimum stay requirement is three nights well yes you better believe that you're leaving a lot of money on the table a lot of old school vacation rental markets I saw this at the

vrma the last time I was there just this last year they still offer 7 night minimum reservations because they're in an old school place where they that's just the way it was but that shouldn't be the case right unless it happens that in that market the average stay is always seven nights but it's never that way right we know that sometimes there's a special event and maybe the event only five nights uh and it's in an off season well then the minimum night stay for that

special event should be five nights but the rest of the year should be set up in a way to get the max amount of reserv ations if you don't know your booking Windows yet well check out price labs. use some of their data check out air DNA or talk with a property manager that might be able to help you out cuz this is really really important stuff uh so assuming you have your minimum night stays set up properly the only time selling these Gap days is

not going to apply is if you have a one night minimum stay but even then you might want to offer that one night at a discounted rate to both reservations on both sides of that so what what does that look like let's say guest a makes a reservation and a couple weeks later guest B makes the reservation and it leaves that two night Gap well the moment we have that Gap we want to offer those Gap days at a discount to both guests so we're going

to reach out and say hey guest day we would love to offer you you can of course word this however you want but we would love to offer to extend your stay at a 30% discount you already know that you're not going to be able to sell those nights because it's smaller than your minimum night stay requirement it's unbook so it's basically blocked on your calendars so you have an opportunity to sell it to the reservation before at a discounted price Everyone likes a discount right

and then you also have the opportunity to sell it to guest B that's checking in afterwards and you can propose it to them in the same way hello guest B and you can even say we we have a gap in our calendar but we would love to offer you a 30% discount to extend your stay if you'd like to check in early now the timing with this is really important so the moment that guest B made their reservation you want to send a message out to

them right away right like instantly because when someone's in the mood of checking out or planning their vacation they're much more likely to extend it they're much more likely to pay for extra services and things like this that's exactly why when you're booking something on booking.com or Airbnb that they offer their experiences after right when someone's in the mode of purchasing it's easier to sell the more stuff that's just the reality to it so you want to be offering to this Gap night the moment that

Gap is created because what is the alternative right you leave the Gap there and you just don't make any money from it it's just lost op opportunity so now the question is well what should you really offer that Gap night at how discounted should it be and the answer is if it's truly lost income does it really matter right maybe you offer it at 50% whatever you're comfortable with whatever you think you can offer it at and earn the most revenue from those nights so you

can be flexible with it too if someone says H I might be able to stay but if you could squeeze a few more dollars out of there I'll go ahead and sign up well that's up to you right that's all on your end but think that you also don't have any additional housekeeping right so your average reservation is now longer you're not having to schedule more housekeeping pay a housekeeping fee and at the end of the day your guest is going to be happier so what

better way to get a five-star review than starting off by giving your guest a longer vacation at a discounted rate right it's it should be done across the board anytime you have these Gap days so so make sure you're keeping an eye on your calendar uh you can set up Gap days in price Labs if you're using price Labs or wheelhouse or one of the dynamic pricing software tools you can set up automatic discounts in there but remember that's not going to send your guest a

message right it's just going to show up in the calendar as a lower price night and so what we've done is we've actually turned off those discounts so anytime we have an orphan day or a gap day they there is no discount because we want to manually reach out to that guest and offer that discount now I know that sounds like a lot of work and it has been for our team you've got to monitor the calendar the more properties you have you got to make

sure that uh Again The timing's crucial so as soon as you get a gap day boom you can send that message out of course you can make that message a template so it's easier for you to send but we signed up for a technology recently called bestie. an artificial intelligence tool that loads right into our property management software we're using hostway it also works with guesty where it recognizes this for us it automatically sends out the message it automatically sends out our discounted rate based on

what the rate was in the calendar that saves our reception team a whole heck a lot of work of course if the guest accepts it then we still have to send them a special price offer in Airbnb or if it's a vbo reservation or booking.com then we have have to adjust that reservation there so of course there's going to be a little bit more work but it's one place where it's a win-win for both sides you as the owner make a little bit more money and

you have a happy guest and that is the name of the game I hope you take advantage of this if you're not already if you've been enjoying the podcast or a YouTube channel remember we're on YouTube now I'd really appreciate it if you wouldn't mind heading over there and just leaving us a little thumbs up or leaving us a like or sharing sh in an episode that's helped you with a family member a friend or someone that you know with a short-term rental I'd really appreciate

it it'll help us continue to to spread the word to spread good practices and hopefully make things ever easier for everyone so until next time have a fabulous week and I'll see you back soon want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals well it all starts with the properties you acquire but you want to make sure that you acquire the write properties I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that there is no charge

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