Availability Controls

Set your property's timezone and stop channels selling tonight's beds after a certain hour.

This is the Availability tab on the Pricing page. Two settings, both about when your beds are on sale rather than for how much.

Property timezone

Set this first. It tells Hostel Mate when "today" starts and ends for you, which matters for reports, for the calendar, and for the cutoff below. If it's blank the cutoff can't be switched on.

Pick your city or region from the list and save. That's it. Changing it later is fine, it just re-sends your availability to the channels so their idea of "today" matches yours.

Same-day booking cutoff

Every hostel has a point in the evening after which a new arrival for tonight is more trouble than it's worth: reception's closed, the night porter can't check people in, or the last bus has gone. Booking.com doesn't know that. Until you tell it, it'll happily sell a bed at 23:40.

The cutoff fixes that. Turn on Enable same-day cutoff, pick a Cutoff Time (say 22:00) and save. From that time on, any beds still free for tonight are shown as fully booked on Hostelworld, Booking.com and every other connected channel. At about 2:00 in the morning the booking day rolls over and tomorrow's beds are on sale as normal. Nothing else changes: walk-ins are fine, your staff can still book anything from the calendar, and dates from tomorrow onward aren't touched.

The page shows you how many hours a night the cutoff blocks, so you can see what you're giving up. A cutoff at 22:00 blocks roughly four hours; a cutoff at 02:00 blocks the entire day, meaning same-day bookings would never be possible, and the page will warn you in red if you set that.

Two things worth knowing:

• Times between 00:00 and 01:59 can't be used, because the booking day rolls over at about 2:00. If what you actually want is "no bookings between midnight and 2 am", set it to 23:50.

• Changes take effect within about five minutes. You don't need to run anything.

When to use it

• You don't take late arrivals and are tired of refunding or turning people away

• Reception closes at a fixed hour and you can't hand over keys after it

• You keep getting last-minute bookings you can't staff for

If your worry is a different one, "how far ahead can people book", that's the Booking Window tab instead.