Day use and hourly stays: selling a room for a few hours

MakeMyTrip says Hourly Stays suit many kinds of traveller, and names pilgrims, business travellers and travellers in transit. Each wants a room for part of a day, not a night:

• Travellers between a flight and a train, or off an overnight bus, who want a shower and a sleep.
• Families getting ready for a wedding or a function nearby.
• Business travellers with a meeting, an interview or a call to make.
• Pilgrims who arrive early and leave the same evening.
• Families of patients at a nearby hospital.

Other sites have tried the same. Agoda announced day use rooms in October 2020, as a trial starting with hotels in South Korea, in blocks of two to ten hours.

Hourly Stays are set up in the InGo-MMT extranet, which serves both MakeMyTrip and Goibibo. MakeMyTrip's partner help gives these steps:

1. 1Sign in to the InGo-MMT extranet and click “Hourly Stays” under the “New Offerings” tab in the menu on the left.
2. 2Under “Room Details”, change the room's name if you want to, and enter the most guests allowed in a room. Click “Edit” to remove amenities you won't offer with Hourly Stays; you can then change the room's description and hide photos and videos.
3. 3Under “Pricing and Availability”, set the availability period: the dates you will sell Hourly Stays.
4. 4Set your rates for the 3 and 6 hour slots, and for the 9 hour slot if you want it. MakeMyTrip shows suggested prices for each slot.
5. 5Enter the rooms you will sell as Hourly Stays, and whether your rates include tax.
6. 6Under “Availability window for Hourly Stays”, choose the hours guests can use the rooms, at any time between 5 AM and 12 AM.
7. 7Under “Allow for Multi-booking”, choose “Yes” to allow more than one booking a room in a day, and set the housekeeping duration: the time you need to ready the room for the next guest.
8. 8Under the cancellation policy, choose “Free Cancellation till midnight before check-in date” or “Non-Refundable”, then click “Enroll”.

Afterwards, rates and rooms are changed in “Rates & Inventory”, then “Calendar View”, on the “HOURLY STAYS” tab, one date at a time or with “Bulk Update”.

• Hourly Stays rooms are managed apart from your full-day rooms, with their own count.
• Guests can only stay within the window you set. By default the system keeps 12 AM to 5 AM closed to them, to avoid night bookings.
• Guests can't book an extra bed with an Hourly Stay; you can provide one and charge your usual rate during the stay.
• Your normal promotions don't apply to Hourly Stays rates.
• Hourly Stays need their own cancellation policy; your other hotel policies don't apply to them.
• You can show different content for Hourly Stays rooms: the name, description, beds, amenities, photos and videos.

The Inventory Cut-Off protects your nights. Switched on in the Hourly Stays settings under “Pricing & Availability”, it stops hourly sales once your full-day rooms fall to a limit you set. The extranet then highlights those dates, and you can reopen hourly sales with “Enable Hourly”, by adding full-day rooms or lowering the limit.

MakeMyTrip suggests a rate for each slot based on your full-day price, which you can use or replace with your own. Think of each slot as a share of a room that would otherwise wait empty:

• Price a slot from what the room earns as a night and what one more clean costs you: linen, laundry, power and the housekeeper's time.
• Sell slots mostly between the morning's check-outs and the evening's arrivals, when rooms stand empty anyway.
• Keep a cut-off on busy nights, so a slot never takes a room a guest would book for the whole night.
• Check the commission on Hourly Stays bookings, as on any booking, before you set the rate.

• Plan housekeeping for it: a room sold twice in a day needs two cleans, and check-out times kept to the minute.
• Check guests in with the same ID and rules as overnight guests. Decide whether you accept IDs from your own city, and say so in your policies.
• Tell guests the end of their slot when they arrive, and what happens if they stay on.
• Read the reviews from day use guests apart: they notice different things, such as the shower, the bed and how quickly they were checked in.
• Watch that day use doesn't wear out rooms and linen faster than it pays for them.

• Count day use apart from room nights, so it doesn't make a night look fuller than it was.
• Add its revenue to your room revenue, but keep it on its own line, so you can see what it brings each month.
• Leave day use out of your average room rate and your length of stay, or work them out both with and without it.
• Each month, set what day use brought beside any nights you couldn't sell because of it.