Letting guests arrive a night early

Guests have always been able to add nights to the end of a stay from the guest portal. Now they can add them to the beginning too — a guest whose flight lands the night before check-in can buy that night themselves, pay for it, and have their booking updated, without messaging you.

What the guest sees

In the guest portal, on their trip, the option to add nights now works in both directions. The guest picks either a later check-out date or an earlier arrival date, sees the price for those nights, and pays. When the payment goes through, their booking is updated immediately and they get a confirmation showing the new dates.

Adding nights at the start is only offered when the night before their arrival is genuinely free on that property. If someone else is staying that night, the option is not shown at all — guests are never invited to buy a night you cannot give them.

What happens to the rest of the booking

When a guest adds a night at the start, the arrival date on the booking moves earlier. That matters more than a later check-out does, because several things are timed off the arrival:

• The door code. The access window moves back to cover the new arrival. The code itself does not change, so anything you have already sent the guest still works.
• The arrival clean. Any job scheduled against the arrival moves with it, so the property is turned over before the guest's new arrival rather than their old one.
• Pre-arrival messages. Check-in instructions and other pre-arrival messages re-target to the new arrival date.
• The calendar. The extra night is blocked on the property and pushed out to your connected channels, so the night cannot be sold twice.

One thing to watch: if a guest moves their arrival forward by enough that a pre-arrival message was already due to go out, that message may have been sent under the old timing, or its send window may have already passed. It is worth a glance at the booking when a guest pulls their arrival in at short notice.

Which bookings can do this

Adding nights at the start works the same way as adding them at the end.

For direct bookings — anything taken through your own booking site — the existing booking is updated in place. The guest keeps one booking with one confirmation code, now covering more nights.

For Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo bookings, the extra nights are sold as a separate booking on your side rather than changing the original, because those channels do not let an existing reservation's arrival date be pulled earlier. The guest still pays once and still ends up with the property for the full period; you will see two bookings rather than one.

Turning it on and off

This uses the same guest portal setting as adding nights at the end. If you already let guests extend their stay, they can now do it in both directions. If you would rather they did not, switching the extend-stay option off in your guest portal settings removes both.

What you will see

When a guest adds nights at the start, you get a notification that says the guest added nights before their stay, showing the old and new arrival dates and what they paid. That is a different message from the one you get for a later check-out, so you can tell at a glance which end moved.

Both are available as automation triggers, so you can send yourself a Slack message, create a job, or notify a cleaner whenever a guest changes either end of their stay.

Related: Guest portal · Availability & stay rules