The Empty Units report shows all available time, including hours, between time blocks, along with what is happening at each of that available time.
The use case for an "Empty Units" report is for when you need to get physical access to the property. You might need to schedule maintenance or set up an event, and you're asking yourself "when is the next time I have more than 12 hours between bookings?" Or perhaps, you want to see time coming up that is really short - like turnaround days with 3 hours between bookings. The Empty Units report shows that.
The date criteria at the top is the period of time you're looking within, and it defaults to a 30 day period starting with today. Below that, you can filter it to a min/max number of hours you're looking for. For instance, you might need at 3 days coming up at one of your properties, so you'd enter 48 hours in the minimum hours side. The report will show you all gaps coming up at the property, when you have at least 48 hours open.
On the left, it shows "Empty For" with the period of time you have left until the next booking comes in (or the next blocked-off time begins). Next to that, it shows you when that begins and what happens at the end - is a guest departing or arriving, does a block begin, etc.
The report also shows a series of warnings on date ranges that are out of the ordinary. These are the warnings that are shown:
- Early Check-In - shown if the empty period ends before a booking where the guest is allowed to arrive earlier than usual.
- Late Check-Out - shown if the empty period begins after a booking where the guest is allowed to stay later than usual.
- No Time - shown if you have two bookings or blocks abutting each other with no time in between. This could happen if you granted late check-out and early check-in back to back without realizing it.
- Same-Day Booking - shown if the empty period is sandwiched between two bookings that occur on the same day (guest leaving in the morning and a different guest coming in the same day).
At the top of the report, there are filters for these as well. So let's select "Same-Day Booking" as a filter and see where it occurs across several properties in the next 30 days.
Notice that in some cases, the "same-day" warning is showing because the guest departs and then the property is blocked off. The system sees that as a same-day issue, but in reality the property is simply blocked off after the guest departs.
Using the date range, hours and warning filters, you can also search for potential problems. I'll select early check-in, late check-out and less than 48 hours to see if any property has unusual check-in granted while being less than 2 days open. And I've found one:
Since it's not a same-day situation, this is probably okay - but if it was same-day, it would show you that, as well as a low number of hours available.
If you're wondering why specific check-in/out times are not showing and you're seeing "standard" text instead, this is because your property rules are not configured with an exact check-in/out time. Go fix that in your property rules and then come back and run the report again.