Overriding Availability Rules

Sometimes you need to take a booking the rules would normally refuse — a guest who wants five nights when the minimum is seven, or a stay that lands on dates you'd manually blocked for an owner who has since changed plans. Argonautas lets a manager override the soft rules and book anyway, in one confirmed step, while still refusing the things that must never be overridden — a genuine double-booking, or dates an OTA has synced.

This happens right in the New Booking form. You fill in the dates as usual and submit; if there's a conflict, Argonautas shows you exactly what's wrong and, where it's allowed, offers a way through.

Soft Rules — "Book anyway"

Soft rules are your own pricing and stay policies. They protect your strategy, not the calendar's integrity, so a manager can knowingly set them aside. They are:

• Minimum stay and maximum stay
• Minimum-stay-through (a longer minimum that applies across specific nights)
• Closed to arrival and closed to departure
• Changeover days (check-in / check-out only on certain days)
• Stop-sell (dates flagged not to sell)

When a booking breaks only soft rules, submitting it opens a confirmation titled Availability rules:

This booking breaks the following rules: Minimum stay is 7 nights (2 requested)

Each broken rule is spelled out in plain language — for example "Check-in only allowed on Saturday" or "These dates are marked stop-sell." Click Book anyway to create the booking regardless, or Cancel to go back and change the dates. Nothing is overridden until you confirm.

Manual Blocks — "Clear block & book"

A manual block is a hold you (or an owner) placed on the calendar — an owner stay, a maintenance window, or another reason. If a new booking lands on one, the same Availability rules dialog explains it:

These dates are held by a Owner Stay block.

Here the button reads Clear block & book. Confirming does both jobs at once, atomically: Argonautas frees exactly the nights you're booking and creates the reservation in a single step. If the block covers more time than the booking, only the booked nights are freed — the owner's or maintenance days on either side stay protected. And if anything goes wrong while creating the booking, the whole thing rolls back, so you can never end up with a cleared block and no booking.

If soft rules are broken and a manual block is in the way, the dialog shows both — the block sentence first, then the broken rules — under the single Clear block & book action.

Hard Stops — What You Can't Override

Some conflicts are never overridable, because forcing them would corrupt the calendar or your OTA channels:

• A real overlap with another confirmed booking (a double-booking).
• OTA / synced blocks — dates blocked by an iCal feed, a channel manager, or another connected system. These reflect availability that lives elsewhere, so clearing them here would only desync.
• Invalid dates — a departure on or before arrival, or arrival in the past.

When you hit one of these, there's no "book anyway." You get a plain message — "These dates are not available and cannot be overridden." — and the booking isn't created. Change the dates, or resolve the conflict at its source (cancel the other booking, or fix the OTA block).

Who Can Override

Overriding is part of creating a booking from the admin New Booking form, so anyone who can book a given property — property managers, and reservations agents booking on a property's behalf — can use it. It isn't a separate permission you grant. Automated paths never override: OTA imports and channel sync always respect the rules, so an override is always a deliberate human choice.

Seeing Who Overrode What

Every override is recorded on the booking. When you confirm one, Argonautas writes a line into the booking's Internal Notes, for example:

⚠ Availability overridden 2026-08-18 by agent@example.com: cleared Owner Stay block (2026-09-20–2026-09-21); minimum stay 7 nights (2 requested); check-in only Saturday.

So anyone reviewing the booking later can see who overrode which rules, when, and why — no guesswork.

Key Concepts

• Soft rule — a stay/pricing policy (min stay, changeover, stop-sell, …) a manager can knowingly override with Book anyway.
• Manual block — an owner/maintenance hold; a booking can Clear block & book through it, freeing only the booked nights.
• Hard stop — a real overlap, an OTA-synced block, or an invalid date. Never overridable.
• Atomic clear-and-book — clearing a manual block and creating the booking happen together, or not at all.
• Override note — the automatic Internal Notes entry recording who overrode what.

Common Questions

A guest wants fewer nights than our minimum. Can I take it? Yes. Submit the booking, and on the Availability rules dialog click Book anyway. The minimum-stay rule is set aside for that booking only.

The dates show an owner block, but the owner cancelled. How do I book over it? Submit the booking and choose Clear block & book. Argonautas frees exactly those nights and books the guest in one step. Owner time outside your booking's dates is left untouched.

Why won't it let me override these dates at all? Because the conflict is a hard stop — a real overlap with another booking, or a block synced from an OTA/channel. Those can't be overridden here; resolve them at the source instead.

Will forcing a booking mess up my OTA calendars? No. Overrides only apply to soft rules and your own manual blocks. Anything synced from an OTA is a hard stop and is never cleared by an override.

How do I know who overrode a rule on a past booking? Open the booking and read its Internal Notes — Argonautas records each override there with the date, the person, and what was overridden.

Related

• Minimum Stay Rules — Setting the minimum-stay rules an override can set aside.
• Calendar & Availability — Manual blocks and the availability calendar.
• Booking Lifecycle — Creating and managing bookings.