Smarter Booking Periods with Listing-Level Time Selection Control for Rentals

🧭 Overview

We’ve significantly improved how Booking Periods work in Rentals to make date and time behavior clearer, more intuitive, and easier to configure.

With this update, businesses can now enable or disable time selection at the listing level, giving them full control over whether customers choose dates only or dates and times — without relying on hidden global settings.

Previously, booking behavior (such as time selection, duration calculation, and multi-day pricing) could depend on global setting configurations, leading to accidental multi-day charges and confusion around rental start/end times.

Booking logic is now explicit, visible, and self-contained within each listing — so businesses can clearly understand how bookings are calculated and charged.

🚀 What’s New

âś… Clear Booking Period Options

You now see three clearly defined Booking Period modes:

  • Date & Time Selector
  • Date Selector
  • Fixed Durations

Each mode now has visible, predictable behavior — with no hidden dependencies.

đź•’ Date & Time Selector

  • Always shows date and time pickers in the booking widget
  • Ideal for hourly rentals or bookings where customers must choose a start time and end time
  • Behavior is no longer affected by hidden global settings

đź“… Date Selector

  • Customers select start and end dates only
  • Default Rental Start Time and Rental End Time are always visible in listing settings
  • Default times (e.g., 3:00 PM start / 11:00 AM end) are clearly applied to calculate duration

This is perfect for vacation rentals, overnight stays, and date-based pricing models.

⏱️ Fixed Durations

For listings with predefined booking durations:

  • Optionally allow customers to select a start time

  • If time selection is disabled, the default 

    Rental Start Time is applied automatically

  • End time is automatically calculated based on the selected duration
  • Monthly bookings roll over to the next calendar month with smart date handling

đź”’ Smart Compatibility Rules

To prevent unsupported configurations:

  • When Booking Period = Date Selector, hourly pricing is disabled
  • When Booking Unit = Hour, Date Selector is disabled

This ensures only valid combinations can be selected.

⚙️ Improved Discoverability

  • “Disable Time Selector” behavior is now surfaced clearly within the listing directly and has been removed from Global Settings

  • Booking logic is now self-contained within each listing

🔄 Migration for Existing Listings

To ensure a smooth transition:

  • Existing listings were mapped to the correct Booking Period mode
  • Default Rental Start/End times were populated where required

🎯 Why This Matters

  • Eliminates accidental multi-day charges
  • Makes rental start/end times visible and predictable
  • Gives businesses control to enable time selection for some listings and disable for others
  • Improves clarity for both admins and customers
  • Increases adoption for vacation rentals and flexible pricing models
  • This update brings Rentals one step closer to being fully intuitive and self-explanatory