There’s a particular kind of frustration in vacation rental management that doesn’t show up in occupancy reports until it’s too late. Your calendar looks open. Your rates are fine. A guest searches your dates, and your direct booking website says no.
No error. No explanation. Just a closed door with an open sign on it.
Those nights are called gap nights or orphan nights. They look available, but they can’t be booked because a minimum stay rule blocks a two-night window, an arrival restriction makes a date invisible, or a missing rate means there’s nothing to sell. The calendar doesn’t know that. The guest doesn’t know that. You often don’t know it either until an owner asks why occupancy is low.
Industry estimates put the cost at roughly 50 of these situations per property per year. At an average nightly rate of $150, that’s $7,500 in potential revenue that never had a chance to convert. Across a 20-property portfolio, it adds up to $150,000 quietly slipping away.
Why Puka Finder Exists
We built Puka Finder in 2019 to catch these situations automatically.
The name comes from Hawaiian. Puka means hole or gap. Puka shells are the small, naturally perforated beach treasures you find on the shore. We find the holes in your calendar.
Dynamic pricing tools have gotten significantly better at handling minimum stay and turn-day rules. Several of them now include gap-filling logic that can automatically lower a minimum stay when a short window opens up. That’s genuinely useful, and if your portfolio is well-configured, it handles a lot.
But in the real world, configurations drift. Rules interact in ways no single tool anticipated. A setting gets adjusted in the PMS and the ruleset slips. Some edge cases are simply too contextual for automation to handle correctly. A beachfront house in peak season with a three-night minimum exists for a reason, and silently dropping it to one night could create more problems than it solves.
Puka Finder is the safety net for what slips through. It doesn’t change your rules. It tells you where they’re creating problems, what each problem costs in estimated revenue, and lets you decide what to do about it. You’re the one who knows your homeowners, your seasonal strategy, and your operational constraints.
It runs automatically after every availability or pricing sync. It tracks every conflict through a full lifecycle: detected, reviewed, resolved, ignored, or escalated. And with version 2.18, it’s faster to work through than ever.
What’s New
See Today’s Conflicts in One Click
The Conflicts screen now has a Today view sitting right next to All in the status tabs. Click it and you see only the conflicts detected today, with a live count.
Because calendars sync every five minutes, that list stays current throughout the day. This is built for your morning routine, but it’s just as useful mid-afternoon when you want a quick check on what came in since you last looked. Instead of scanning the full list and trying to remember what’s new, you click Today, and you’re looking at exactly what needs attention. A filter chip at the top lets you remove it and return to the full list whenever you’re ready.
Fix the Expensive Gaps First
The Amount column is now sortable. Click the header and your conflicts reorder by estimated revenue impact, highest first.
Not all gaps cost the same. A three-night window at a beachfront property at $800 per night is a $2,400 problem. A one-night orphan at a budget cabin might be $89. Before this, you had to work that out mentally while scanning dozens of rows. Now the sort does it for you.
The calculation uses actual synced nightly rates for the affected dates, not a generic estimate. It’s the real number your booking engine is leaving on the table.
A Screen That Teaches Itself
Every column header now shows a plain-language description on hover. Min Stay tells you what it means. Amount explains how it’s calculated. Found tells you when the conflict was first detected. Icon-only columns like the calendar shortcut and the property link announce their purpose too, both on hover and for screen readers.
This matters when you’re onboarding a new team member mid-season. The screen explains itself. No documentation required, no one sitting next to them walking through it.
Less Noise, Better Focus
A few smaller changes that add up. Filters and active filter chips are now in separate rows, so it’s always clear at a glance what’s applied. The summary line now reflects only active conflicts (New, Viewed, and Failed), so the estimated affected revenue number means something instead of being inflated by already-resolved issues. Rate TID and Rate Code are hidden by default to reduce clutter but are still one click away in Screen Options when you need rate-level detail. Two new navigation buttons at the bottom let you view all conflicts or reset date and nights filters without losing your property context.
The entire Conflicts screen is also now fully responsive. Everything adapts to whatever screen you’re on, so if you’d rather do your morning triage from your phone while the coffee is still brewing, that works too.
Your Morning Routine with 2.18
Open Conflicts. Click Today. Sort by Amount. If you want to focus only on what hasn’t been touched yet, click the New label on any row and the table filters itself instantly. The most expensive unaddressed conflicts are now at the top.
Click the calendar icon on the first one, confirm the dates and the conflict type, fix it in Track, or use the automated fix if the type supports it. Mark it addressed and move to the next one. Check the summary line at the bottom and watch the estimated affected revenue come down.
What used to mean thirty minutes of scrolling and mentally sorting priorities now takes about five.
It’s Already on Your Site
No plugin update is needed. No deployment checklist. TechSpokes Booking Engine is delivered as part of your website service, which means when we ship an update, it goes live on your site automatically.
If you haven’t opened the Conflicts screen in a while, tomorrow morning is a good time to take a look. The pukas are waiting.