Adjacency Rules in Wheelhouse 🗓️

Keegan here.

And today I'm going to walk through one of the recent updates that Wheelhouse has made to our minimum stays setting.

And this is specifically to the subsetting that we used to call one sided gaps.

It is now called adjacency rules.

and this is a specific subsetting again within minimum stays that lets you adjust your minimum stay restrictions before an unavailability or after an unavailability.

And by unavailability I just mean a booking or a block on the calendar.

So any date that is unavailable on your calendar you can adjust before or after using adjacency rules.

So let's get into it.

I'm here on my example listing, I'm on minimum stays.

So here are all of these sub rules and if you've used Wheelhouse, you're familiar with all of these.

But I'm just going to give you a quick rundown before I get into adjacency rules specifically.

so like with most settings in Wheelhouse you have a global or a default rule at the very top.

and then we typically get more granular as you go down.

So we have day, week, monthly time based season events, adjacency rules and gap night rules, for min stays and then we have override.

So we have date specific overrides.

This is also relatively new rule prioritization, section and then absolute minimum.

So under mint stays is actually probably the, the longest list for a setting we have.

but you can, you can do quite a bit.

So and just a reminder that the priority for these sub rules here or subsettings is given from the bottom up.

So for example, if I have a global minimum of three nights and then I go into day of week and I say, you know what, actually I want my minimum on Fridays and Saturdays to be 4.

Since this rule is below this one here, it takes priority and that's very important as we start looking at adjacency rules, because of where it is positioned right.

So anyways, let's get into it.

So I'm going to go into adjacency rules, and some of this.

I'm, I'm recording this before we fully release.

So it's not fully polished yet.

It'll look a lot cleaner for you it won't have all these like admin things that I see.

So anyways, I'm going to add a rule if you've used this setting in the past.

Again it used to be called one sided gaps.

then you might be familiar with the ui.

if not, I'm going to walk through it anyway.

So, when I add a rule here, I have rule one.

what this is now asking me is whether I want this to be more granular by month or day of week.

We'll get into relative mode.

That's a new thing for us here.

but let's skip those for now.

Let's just talk about the base, setting here.

So I have to make a choice before unavailability or after an availability.

Again, that's before a book booking or before a block or after a booking after a block.

Right.

and I'm going to show you a visual example to go along with what I'm doing here in a second.

So we have to make that choice and then you have to choose how many days after or before you want the rule to apply to.

Right.

And then you can select your minimum here.

and there's a couple other things too, which I might get into later.

But that's kind of the core of it.

You have to choose before or after how many days are impacted and what the minimum is.

but what does this mean in practice?

Why would I ever want to use this?

let's go to the calendar real quick.

So on my listing here, I have my calendar, and I'm going to start with a very basic example, of, you know, let's assume, my listing is in a downtown, urban market here.

I generally have like high, you know, weekend, travel.

And so I want to deal with this scenario here.

You can see Saturday is sold as well as Sunday and Monday.

But Saturday sold, Thursday and Friday are now left open.

Typically my minimum stay requirement you can see here is three nights.

So technically the only way Thursday and Friday would get sold in this scenario is if someone booked for Wednesday for three nights.

Right.

Now, Wednesdays are not typically that popular in my market.

Right.

And so what I might want to do is I might want to do two things.

I might want to just simply drop my Thursday, from a three night minimum requirement to two or you know, depending on your market.

you could also want to drop your Friday to a one night minimum.

Right.

of course, you know, my General Mint stay here is three nights.

But you could be in a market where generally you want two nights and you're okay taking a one night stay.

So you'll just drop Friday.

I can do either of those things with the adjacency rules.

So let's start with The Thursday dropping, to two nights.

And I'll also show you if you just wanted to switch this up and have a two night general mint state and drop Friday.

So let's do that.

So in this case, I'm dealing with before and unavailability again.

If I jump back here before this booking, I want to address how my minimum stays, are changing, right?

So I'm going to choose before.

I'm also specifically dealing with the scenario when Saturday is sold or blocked.

I want to drop my Thursday minimum stay.

So I'm going to go ahead and specify day of week right now.

This is where it can get a little bit confusing.

So bear with me here.

So now the number of days again, that's how many days before the unavailability I want to adjust.

Well if Saturday sold and I want to impact Thursday, I have to select prior 12 days.

So I'm going to enter two here.

And in this case all I'm going to do is input two in Thursday.

So even though I'm saying hey, I want to impact the prior two days, if Saturday's booked prior two days, I don't have to put anything into Friday if I don't want to.

Right?

And, and in doing this actually will like will do nothing, right.

If Saturday sold and I change the minimum to two on Friday, it doesn't do anything, doesn't matter right now when I'm here, I also, if I wanted to, I could drop Friday down to one night right now.

Again, you may not take one night stays.

There might be risk that later in the video I'll show you how to also pair adjacency rules with a pricing setting.

So if you are dropping your minimum to one on a Friday, you can bump up the rate, you know, 20, 30, 100%, whatever it is, right?

So anyways, let's start with a simple example.

So now what I've done is I've said okay before an unavailability prior two days.

Change my Thursday to two night minimum.

One piece of advice I have.

When you are going and trying to create settings like this that are a little bit more complex, like little bit confusing, do what I did find the example you're trying to automate or solve for on your calendar, right?

So I found an example here for a listing.

Pull up that listing like I did, start creating the rule and then at the top of the setting there is this chart, right?

And you can verify if what you're trying to accomplish is actually happening right is my Thursday.

What is the date again?

Thursday the 9th.

April 9th.

Is it dropping to two nights?

Well, let me find it.

It is.

Right, I can see here April 9th is now dropping to two nights.

If I go back and remove this rule and scroll up, you'll see it bumped back up to three nights.

Right.

And so I big piece of advice.

Always use the settings chart, regardless of what setting you're looking at.

Actually it's a great practice, but especially with minimum stays I and, and gab rules and adjacency rules, it's incredibly helpful.

Right, Right.

So it looks like I'm, I'm doing that.

now you can go further here.

Right.

Maybe my min stays actually looks a little bit, different, depending on the time of year.

Right.

So I'm just having a very simple global of three nights year, round.

Right.

but you might also have time based rules or monthly or season and event rules.

Right.

and so, you want to pause there.

I'm going to set up my listing to show you what that could look like and we're going to walk through some of the new aspects of this setting.

So be right back.

So I've set up another pretty simple example here.

The only thing I changed was I, instead of just having a global minimum stay of three, I have some season rules for my harvest season here where I have a pretty Restrictive minimum, further out for these fall months.

And then using time based rules under the season, I do bring that down, while within the booking window.

So that's the only thing I changed.

But let's talk about another simple use case of adjacency rules.

So I'm just going to add a rule here and then this time I'm going to select relative mode.

So I'm going to go ahead and select that.

You see the UI does update to this plus or minus version.

So if I go back, you can see before I was dealing with explicit rules, where I would say, and I was doing this by day of week, I was saying, hey, I want the minimum to be two nights on Thursday, right?

Explicitly.

But if I go back to relative mode, instead of explicit rules here, I put in how much I want my minimum stay to increase or decrease by regardless of the, the, the time of year.

in this case, I want it to decrease by one night, right?

I mean again this is after unavailability.

So that logic is still the same.

I have to choose before or after how many days, right?

And how much I want the minimum to decrease by.

And so if we go back to my chart here, we can see there's a couple blips.

If I zoom in, you'll see this better couple blips where there's an unavailability on the 13th here, I'm bringing my minimum stay down to two.

Same thing on the 6th and the 7th, bringing the mint stay down to two.

this is just a general rule that, you know, maybe I want to better surface back to back or sorry better optimize for back to back bookings, right?

so generally just after any checkout I'm going to bring my minimum stay down as just a rule of thumb.

That way maybe I can incentivize someone to book right after someone else is checking out, right?

I might not want to do this every day of the week.

This might be more traditionally a weekday option that people want to pursue.

and then you get way more specific on your weekends, right?

So I could do a day of week relative after subsequent one day.

If any day of the week is sold then or booked or blocked, then the following weekday will drop its minimum stay.

Right.

And I could go as far as, of course, you know, bringing it down two nights on Mondays and Tuesdays, and only, one.

Oops, sorry.

Only one on Thursdays.

Right.

So, you can get way more granular and way more specific, but just as a general rule, for back to back bookings, this is something I can use this for.

All right, I'm going to go ahead and set up another example, and maybe we'll get a little bit, more complex with the setup here.

Okay, now we're going to cover how to have parity between the adjacencies rules under minimum stays with the gaps and adjacency rules for pricing.

So first I'm going to set up a quick, pretty, straightforward example, under the min stays for adjacency rules.

So I'm going to go ahead and add two rules here and you'll see, fully why I'm going to specify by day of week.

On both of them, I'm going to choose before and availability for the first one.

And in this one, after selecting day of week, I'm just going to enter one for Friday and then on the other one, after selecting day of week and making sure after unavailability is set, I'm just going to put one in for Saturday.

So this is just a very straightforward example, going back to something we already hit on, which is the split weekends.

In this case though, I'm not dealing with just Thursdays.

I'm actually for this property, dropping my Friday minimum stay requirement to one when Saturday is booked and then dropping Saturday, to one night minimum stay requirement when Friday is booked.

there are a couple other features that are new to this setting that I do want to mention quickly.

that I'm going to use only one of those, but I'm going to mention all three of them.

real quick.

the first two things I want to mention are the min and max lead time options.

Now if you've used our normal gap night rules at all, you are familiar with these or maybe, maybe you're not.

I'll explain them right now in both cases, under adjacencies and gap night rules, they work the same.

So, mid lead time here, is specifying a number of days, out that I want to have in the future before I start applying this rule.

For example, if I type in 5 for minimum lead time here, this means I am not going to be doing any adjacency adjustments, from today until the next, five days.

Right.

So, for example, let me just show you on my calendar.

let me actually pop up in the calendar so I can show you coming up here On, I believe, April 9, we've already looked at this.

The Friday is available and the Saturday is not.

Right.

So you can see here on the calendar that Friday the 10th is available and Saturday's book.

Right.

And so if I put in a minimum lead time of five, that would put the rules to start applying, five days from now today is the seventh and so the tenth would not fall within that time period.

And so you can see the 10th here is not getting that rule applied.

If I change this min lead time to let's just say only two nights or two days, sorry, then you can see that rule is now applying.

Right?

And so mainly time.

Most of the time folks want to use this for any operation consideration.

so if you want to give your cleaning staff, you know, five, three, five days ahead, you know, notice before you start doing one night stays on the weekends, that's typically how I see that used.

I'm not going to use it here.

but I just want to mention that same with max lead time, it's just the inverse of min lead time.

I'm actually going to use this one though.

I'm going to put in a max lead time of 45 days.

This is essentially saying hey, I don't want to do any split weekend adjustments from my adjacency rules outside of 45 days from now.

So, so in the further out future I don't want to be doing any one night stays.

Right.

and that you know typically I see that for cancellation considerations that people don't want to do that.

Just in case, you know, you have a split weekend in 200 some days from now, that one night gets booked, but then the other reservations canceled.

Now you're just left with only a one night stay on that weekend when you probably could have still gotten two after that cancellation.

So that's typically why I see that I'm going to use it here in this case.

okay, so I'm just going to save this rule, or these two rules, which, again, is just dealing with split weekends, Friday and Saturday.

the, the next thing I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go to gaps and adjacencies.

And this is a pricing setting.

and this setting here does not handle minimum stay adjustments by default or for the recommended most of the time.

or what this setting does is it just decreases Rates for gap nights.

in this case I'm going to go rule based and I'm going to add in my own rules because I want to increase the rates if I am dropping my minimum stay on split weekends, right?

And so the UI is a little bit different here.

but what I'm going to do is I'm going to say only before for one rule and then only after.

So it's before unavailability and after unavailability similar to the minimum stay setting.

And then I'm only wanting to deal with for this rule Friday.

So before the unavailability and then for this rule here, after the unavailability I'm dealing with the Saturday.

And then this within is essentially the subsequent number of days like we saw in the min day rule or the prior number of days.

So I'm just going to leave that at one.

And then here's where I input what percentage adjustment I want.

So I am going to just put in a 30 premium for any of these days, right?

And we can see that there is one example on my calendar, April 10th here.

If I go up and look at the pricing chart, April 10th is a Friday.

And if I zoom in and make this a little bit bigger, you all can see that this Saturday is booked, right?

And it's booked at 245 New Zealand dollars.

Friday is open, right?

So this is a SPL split, split weekend example like I was talking about.

And in this case I am now automatically dropping my minimum stay since this is now three days out.

it's just in that window of between three and 45 days.

and so I'm dropping my minimum stay to one night.

And then with this rule here, I am increasing my rates by 30%.

Let me actually throw in something crazy like 500%.

So you can see this in real time update once it loads here.

There we go.

You can see now my price is like you know, astronomically high, right?

Because I put in that really really high percentage, just so you can see how that changes.

So and you can of course go with increases or decreases.

If I am wanting to decrease my rates for one night stays for whatever reason, I could do that or any other situation scenario.

So this is an example how you can have parity between the minstay adjacency rules and the gaps and adjacencies, setting.

So if you have any questions, of course, feel free to always reach out to our 247 chat support and let us know what you think.

Thanks.