We host primarily events (baby showers, birthdays, etc) and currently have 3 hours as our minimum booking. What is your minimum booking time? Has anyone experimented with minimum booking hours vs raising rental prices per hour?
Related - I’d love to be able to raise this to 4 hours for weekends but keep it at 3 hours for weekdays / weeknights / have a tiered structure.
Like you, most of my bookings are parties, but it seems my experience here in Oakland is somewhat different from other peerspace hosts. My minimum is 6 hours, mostly because I want to encourage guests to allow an hour for load-in/setup and an hour to move out, for a 4-hour party of 80 people. I’ve seen some really slick operations that get the party done in 3 hours, but that is rare.
I want the event to go smoothly. I even allow a free hour to load in the previous day, if the time is available. I use that time to test the sound and the slide show on my system if needed. This allows time to correct any problems.
If the event goes smoothly, I (usually) get a good review!
Hey Aaron, we have a 5-hour minimum for events, and that’s just how long these things take: baby showers, birthdays, etc. At least 90 minutes to 2 hours to set up and decorate, guests are here 3-4 hours, then 45 min to an hour to pack up and load out.
I let someone try 4 hours for a baby shower, and there was a lot of rushing around, impacts the quality of the event for everyone. Most guests appreciate advice based on experience (and some just want to get the cheapest price they can).
We offer an hourly rate with a minimum one hour booking. We provide 30 minutes before and after the event (for free) for load-in/setup and then load-out/cleanup. If the client needs more, they can reserve a longer booking.
We have a four-hour minimum but in certain situations can be flexible. On the other hand, we require that our guests pay for all time they or their vendors are on site–including setup and load-out. It seems like I do a lot of educating renters about how much time their caterers are likely to want on site, but that’s part of the job, I guess.
We don’t have a minimum time frame for booking an event at our space, but any booking over 4 hours costs our clients $50 dollars less, an hour. For example: a 3 hour event would be $200/hourly, whereas a 6 hour event is $150/hourly. Good luck and Take care to all hosts… It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it!!
Due to the amount of time prepping the space, I set a four hour minimum booking time.
We have a 2-hr minimum on weekdays and 3-hr minimum on weekends for mostly productions and events. However, most of our events are about 4-8hrs long with setup/cleanup loading/unloading.
I would just keep it 3 hours minimum across the board. I found that people like consistency.
My studio has a two hour minimum, and it’s a big thing that’s contributed to our success. We’re a dedicated photo studio that gets used by many local photographers. Two hours is perfect for what they need, and it keeps people coming in.