Offer early arrival and late checkout

Someone flying in from another continent does not want to land the morning your retreat starts, jet-lagged and walking straight into opening circle. Someone who has just spent a week in silence does not want to be packing a bag and driving to the airport two hours after closing circle ends. Both are ordinary situations at almost any retreat, and both used to mean an email back and forth with whoever runs your front desk, a manual rate lookup, and a separate charge to sort out afterward.

Extend your stay is the option that handles this without any of that back-and-forth. When a guest picks a room on your BrightStar event page, they also see a small stepper for nights before and nights after the retreat, up to three on each side. The price updates as they choose, and the extra nights are held as real inventory alongside the retreat itself — not a note added to their reservation, but rooms actually taken off the market for those dates.

The nights before and nights after are the only numbers that come from the guest's browser. Everything else — the actual amount charged — is calculated on BrightStar's servers, using the room's effective nightly rate. That rate is your per-event override if you've set one for that room on that event, or the room type's own standing rate if you haven't. Because the money side never travels through the guest's device, the number shown in the panel is already the number BrightStar will charge, not an estimate waiting for confirmation later.

That also explains why a missing rate doesn't quietly default to a free extension. If BrightStar can't resolve a nightly rate for a room, the extension is refused rather than priced at zero. A guest can still book the retreat itself; they simply can't add nights the system has no rate to charge them for.

Three nights before and three nights after is enforced twice — once when the extension is added to the cart, and again at the moment of payment — so the limit holds even if something upstream tries to push past it. It keeps the feature to what it's meant for: bridging the gap between someone's travel and your retreat dates, not replacing a full separate booking. A guest who wants a longer stay before or after can still book that time on your property directly, outside the retreat extension, where no such cap applies.

At payment, BrightStar reserves the room across the guest's full extended window — from their real arrival date through their real departure date, not just the retreat's own dates. That means the extra nights are genuinely unavailable to anyone else, the same as any other night in that room. If the room turns out not to be free for the whole window someone is asking for, the payment doesn't go through; nothing is charged for nights BrightStar can't actually deliver.

This is also why the extension only exists where you're offering rooms in the first place. If an event has no accommodations attached, there's no room and no nightly rate to build a stepper from — early arrival and late checkout follow directly from the accommodations you've already set up, and like the rest of that accommodations toolset, it's part of Elevate.