Unit 4 · Implementing Your Pricing Strategy · Lesson 4.6
Stay restrictions in practice
Stay restriction settings form a hierarchy: one default rule covers the whole year, and booking-window rules and orphan gap rules override it. That structure dictates the setup. Set the default to the midpoint of your strategy, put your nearest and furthest rules in the overriding layers, and let the orphan policy run automatically.
The full lesson text below is an edited transcript of the video, published 2026-08-24. The complete course is free at the playbook.
The hierarchy decides the setup
A variable minimum stay strategy applies different rules across different booking windows, weekdays and weekends separately. The settings that implement it are layered, and understanding the layering is what makes the configuration obvious.
One default rule applies year-round if nothing else is set. Last-minute rules and far-out rules override it for their specific booking windows, and the orphan gap policy overrides it as well. Because the default is the layer everything else displaces, it belongs at the midpoint of your variable strategy, with the nearest-term rules and the furthest-out rules sitting in the layers above it. If your strategy has more than three tiers, more than one last-minute or far-out rule can be created to carry them.
Suggested settings are a benchmark, not a plan
Pricing tools will generate suggested stay restrictions and apply them for you in a click, and after applying them you can still adjust each setting by hand. The recommendation is nonetheless to work from your own strategy rather than from the suggestions.
The reason is the same one that governs the pricing side: your strategy came out of an assessment of a comp set you defined and vetted yourself, while the suggestions come from data you did not choose. Reusable stay profiles are the more useful shortcut, since a profile you built once can be applied to a listing whenever you need the same set of rules.
A worked configuration
On a sample listing with no restrictions at all, the default rule went in first: two nights on weekdays, three on weekends, immediately visible across every date in the calendar including future months.
Then the overriding layers. A last-minute rule of two nights on both weekdays and weekends, applied within seven nights, which relaxed the coming weekend from the three-night default. A far-out rule of three nights on weekdays and four on weekends beyond thirty days, which took effect the following month, weekdays from the 15th and weekends from the 16th. Reading those changes back on the calendar is how you confirm a booking-window rule landed where you intended rather than assuming it did.
The orphan gap policy earns its keep
The orphan gap setting is where automation genuinely pays. On the same listing, a single night on the 30th sat between two booked dates. With a two-night minimum as the most relaxed rule in force, that night was unbookable, and the calendar flagged it as such.
An orphan gap policy fixed it without anyone editing the date: an adjustment matching the length of the gap, for gaps between one and three nights, on both weekdays and weekends. The range follows from the rest of the strategy, since the most relaxed rule was two nights and the strictest was four, so any gap of one to three nights is capable of being stranded. Once saved, the 30th relaxed to a one-night requirement on its own, and every future gap the bookings create gets handled the same way. That is the difference between a policy and a chore.
Check-in and check-out restrictions
One further restriction may be available depending on whether your channel manager supports it: limiting which days of the week a guest can check in or check out. It has legitimate uses, the clearest being days when your cleaners are unavailable, so a turnover cannot be scheduled.
Treat it carefully, because it applies to every date across the entire year rather than to a window you choose. Use it only where you are certain the constraint is genuinely permanent. Worth knowing too that the restriction is not visible on the calendar at a glance; it shows up in the per-date summary, so a restriction you set and forgot is easy to miss later.